Related Items Full Coverage: White House Releases New Budget

By Sara Hebel
LEGI-SLATE News Service
Monday, Feb. 8, 1998

President Clinton's fiscal year 1999 budget calls for initiatives dealing with improved safety of the food supply and restoration of food stamp benefits for certain immigrants.

Food Safety: The budget includes a $101 million increase in funds for its food safety initiative for research, risk assessment, education and surveillance programs.

After several recent foodborne illness outbreaks, Congress and the White House have paid increased attention to developing new science-based food inspection programs. The administration has created an inter-agency food safety initiative, which received a total of about $841.7 million in the current fiscal year, to provide a national early warning system for food-borne illnesses. The plans also provides for improved federal-state coordination when outbreaks do occur.

Food Stamps: Clinton's budget would undo portions of the 1996 welfare reform law [P.L. 104-193] by restoring food stamp benefits for legal immigrant families regardless of when they entered the United States.

The administration plan, which includes a total of $2.7 billion over five years to restore food stamp benefits and to let states provide additional health care to the children of legal immigrants, also would provide food stamp benefits to the elderly or disabled individuals who entered the program before Congress enacted cuts under welfare reform.

Finally, the budget also would lengthen to seven years from five years the amount of time refugees and asylees would be exempt from the food stamp ban. Under the budget proposal, Hmong refugees from Laos who immigrated to the United States after the Vietnam conflict and certain Native Americans living along the Canadian and Mexican borders also would be exempt from the food stamp ban.

Agriculture: The budget would provide a total of just over $11 billion in outlays for agriculture programs. That includes about $4.2 billion, or almost exactly the same as the current budget, for discretionary programs and $6.8 billion for mandatory spending programs, which would receive $427 million more than last fiscal year.

For fiscal year 1999, the budget includes $342 million (a $6 million increase) for agriculture credit loan programs, $140 million (an $84 million decrease) for the P.L. 480 or Food for Peace program, $1.3 billion (a $240 million increase) for agricultural research programs, $6.7 billion (a $236 million increase) for the Commodity Credit Corporation and $1.47 billion (a $384 million increase) for federal crop insurance programs.

On farmland conservation matters, the budget also stipulates that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would increase the number of acres enrolled in federal programs each year for riparian buffers and filter strips to 3.76 million from an estimated 3.36 million acres in 1998. It also would increase the acreage of restored wetlands in the Wetlands Reserve Program to 1.34 million acres from an estimated 1.2 million acres in 1998.