No Drought Required For Federal Drought Aid

Ann M. Veneman, then secretary of agriculture, proclaimed at a September 2002 news conference that the plan "will provide immediate assistance to producers who need it the most."

To qualify, a rancher had to be in a county that was suffering from a drought and declared a disaster by the agriculture secretary in 2001 or 2002. More than 2,000 counties had such declarations at the time, including many with only modest dry spells.

All that livestock owners had to do was show up at their county agriculture office and fill out a short form certifying the number of animals they owned as of June 1, 2002. Short-staffed county offices were hard pressed to verify the numbers. They did only limited spot checks.

A spokesman for the USDA, Ed Loyd, said last week that the system was meant to distribute funds quickly. "Given the severity of the drought, we were confident enough of the losses" to forgo the time-consuming process of checking every farm and ranch, Loyd said.

Agriculture officials estimated the program would require $752 million. But so many ranchers and dairy farmers applied that the cost quickly ballooned to $900 million. At the time, a second year of the program wasn't being contemplated.

Then lawmakers from Arkansas to Wisconsin wrote more than 100 letters to Veneman's office, complaining that the USDA's sign-up deadline of Sept. 19, 2002, was "arbitrary" and "bureaucratic." Deserving counties, they said, were being excluded. Virginia's delegation alone sent 20 letters, including six from Republican Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. The congressman's office said he was responding to requests from his constituents.

The Agriculture Department soon added dozens of counties to its drought list.

"There was pressure that year to grow emergency declarations for drought," recalled Hunt Shipman, a former top USDA official who now works as a lobbyist in Washington.

Still, even with the growing list, hundreds of counties remained ineligible because they had not been declared drought-stricken areas. That, Shipman said, is when "Congress came back in. They decided to drop the drought requirement in the second year."

Under Congress's new version of the program in 2003, livestock owners could qualify as a result of any type of weather-related disaster declaration by the secretary of agriculture. Or they could become eligible if their county was included in a presidential disaster declaration. Under the new rules, the time period covered also was extended, to Feb. 20, 2003. One rule remained the same: Livestock owners still did not have to prove a loss.

The expansion was pushed by a bipartisan group of senators from Western states and House members from the Southeast. House-Senate negotiators then added the legislation to a huge annual spending bill that was not subject to amendments on the floor.

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), the top-ranking Senate GOP negotiator on the agricultural provisions, did not return telephone calls seeking comment. Former Rep. Max Burns (R-Ga.), who introduced legislation to extend the livestock program in January 2003, also did not return calls requesting comment.