Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue is likely to get an earful about farmers’ trade concerns when he heads to Capitol Hill this week, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt faces a grilling by two House panels.

 

Perdue appears before the Senate Agriculture Committee on Tuesday. Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Trump administration’s trade policy and has expressed opposition to Perdue’s plan to use newly restored spending authority to compensate farmers who've been harmed by retaliatory tariffs.

 

Thanks to the fiscal 2018 omnibus spending bill enacted in March, Perdue has $15 billion of borrowing authority on USDA’s Section 5 that he can use to compensate farmers. The omnibus lifted a restriction on Section 5, and a related program, Section 32, that Republican appropriators imposed after then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack made payments to farmers ahead of the 2010 congressional elections.

 

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