Klobuchar, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Democrats also wrote Thune that the Senate should avoid the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP that are in the House-passed reconciliation bill. 

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., said, “To rein in federal spending and protect taxpayer dollars the committee is pursuing meaningful reforms to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to improve efficiency, accountability and integrity.”

“We are continuing to examine options that comply with Senate rules to achieve savings through budget reconciliation to ensure SNAP serves those who truly need it while being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Boozman said.

“The proposal to shift SNAP costs onto the states was a sticking point with Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine),” The Hill reported.

The parliamentarian’s ruling could make it easier for Thune to pick up Murkowski’s and Collins’s support as the SNAP-related pay-for will now need to be stripped from the legislation, The Hill added. 

The proposal to shift some SNAP benefit costs to the states started in the bill that House Republicans narrowly passed and sent to the Senate, but neither House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., or ranking member Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., have commented on the parliamentarian’s ruling. 

Food Research & Action Center President Crystal FitzSimons said in an email, “FRAC is relieved that two of the harmful SNAP provisions in the budget reconciliation bill — pushing benefit costs to states and restricting eligible immigrants from participating in the program — have been rejected by the Senate parliamentarian.”

“This is a step in the right direction, but the bill is still downright devastating,” FitzSimons said.

Neither Klobuchar nor Boozman commented on the impact of the parliamentarian’s rejection of the provision suspending permanent price support authority. This provision refers to the longstanding practice of suspending permanent laws from the 1930s and 1940s for the length of the farm bill. The last farm bill was passed in 2018 but Congress has passed extensions of that bill. The current one expires on Sept. 30. 

It is unclear what impact the rejection of the suspension of permanent price support authority would have on the bill’s provisions to add additional funding to a number of programs including the Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage basic subsidy programs. 

One former Senate Agriculture Committee aide with a knowledge of the situation said, “The suspension of permanent law does not have a budgetary impact, which means it is subject to a Byrd rule violation and has been removed. The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] has never scored a return to permanent law because it is assumed it will never occur. If the CBO cannot alter the deficit impact of a proposal in reconciliation, it cannot proceed.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has opposed the suspension of permanent price support authority because it would set up two different expiration dates for programs that are usually part of a farm bill.

Michael Lavender, NSAC policy director, said in an email, “The Suspension of Permanent Price Support Authority provision, if enacted, would:

“(1) further entrench two sets of authorization dates for farm bill programs — conservation, numerous commodity, and a handful of other programs would be authorized through 2031, whereas the rest of the farm bill programs plus CRP would be authorized through Sept. 30, 2025.

“This would make passing a farm bill any time soon more complicated for everything outside conservation, commodity, and the handful of programs;

“And (2) since the threat of reversion to permanent law for commodity programs is often one of the main driving forces in enacting a new farm bill extension, this provision would remove that threat — fundamentally changing the calculus of how and when an FB extension gets done, which would be particularly problematic when (1) is also the case,” Lavender said.

The American Soybean Association has expressed disappointment in the Senate Finance Committee’s budget reconciliation text that made significant modifications to the House-passed Section 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit language. 

“The Senate Finance Committee text reverts on the progress made in the House to support U.S. farmer-driven domestic biofuels by removing a key provision to ring-fence North American feedstocks and prevent foreign feedstocks from benefitting from U.S. taxpayer dollars,” ASA said. 

“The Senate 45Z proposal turns its back on the Trump Administration’s farmer-first American energy dominance agenda, which was highlighted through EPA’s strong renewable volume obligations proposal that U.S. agriculture applauded,” said Caleb Ragland, American Soybean Association President and farmer from Magnolia, Ky.

“RVOs and the 45Z tax credit should be seeking to achieve the same goals for U.S. farmers and domestic biofuel production, and instead the Senate budget reconciliation language seeks to provide U.S. taxpayer dollars to foreign feedstock competitors at the expense of soybean farmers.” 

Government Executive has reported that the bill also contains a provision that “would reestablish the authority for a president to reorganize government as long as these plans do not result in an increase in federal agencies and the plan does not result in an increase in federal spending.”

That provision would open the doors for a large-scale reorganization at the Agriculture Department with the possibility of shifting some programs to other parts of the government. 

Agriculture Secretary. Brooke Rollins, whose motto is “Farmers First,” has talked about offloading some parts of USDA.

Rollins has not talked about what divisions of USDA might be moved, but Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led effort on reorganizing the government, said all the nutrition programs at USDA including SNAP, the single biggest program there, should be moved to the Health and Human Services Department.

Both farm and nutrition advocates have said that splitting the  farm and nutrition programs into different departments would ruin the coalition that has passed farm bills for decades, but conservatives have praised the possibility. 

The Senate faces many other problems in passing the reconciliation bill. 

There has been talk of the Senate ignoring the parliamentarian’s rulings, but Thune has said he doesn’t want to do that. 

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has said the Senate version of the bill can’t pass the House due to the Senate’s Medicaid provisions.