U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) responded to President Barack Obama’s Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Proposal on Monday, stating that the budget would ignore many concerns held by ranchers and farmers nationwide.
Of the $4 trillion requested by Obama, $156 billion would go toward agriculture. Although the proposed agriculture budget is 3 percent higher than the previous year, Obama is calling for a cut in farmers’ crop insurance.
“I have heard repeatedly from farmers in Kansas and across the country that crop insurance is the key tool in managing risks associated with drought, flood, freeze, hail and other weather events,” Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, said. “The president’s budget again turns a deaf ear to our nation’s farmers and ranchers by directly cutting the very tool that helps growers produce a safe and affordable food supply year after year. We have seen these types of proposals from this administration before, and Congress has been right to ignore them.”
Roberts also had issue with Obama’s proposal to create a new food safety department within the federal government.
“Unfortunately, this administration’s track record of increasing regulations and growing the federal bureaucracy remains consistent in this budget request,” he explained.
Obama’s proposal calls for consolidating the Agriculture Department’s Food and Safety and Inspection Service with the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety oversight to create a new agency that would be overseen by the Health and Human Services Department.
“Over the course of my chairmanship, the Agriculture Committee will conduct rigorous and thorough oversight of the departments and agencies within our committee’s jurisdiction,” Roberts concluded. “We owe it to the taxpayers, farmers and ranchers to ensure that their government works in an efficient and effective manner, not in ways that waste taxpayer resources or impose ideological agendas.”