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On Wednesday night, Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), a longtime farmer and member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, spoke out against House Republicans’ Agriculture Appropriations bill for the 2025 fiscal year. In remarks before the full House Appropriations Committee, Pingree said the bill puts critical nutrition programs at risk, hurts farmers in Maine and across the country, and threatens our ability to fight climate change. 



Click here to watch Pingree’s full remarks; a complete transcript is copied below.

House Republicans’ Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration bill provides $25.9 billion in discretionary funding, a four percent cut below 2024. The legislation:

• Increases costs for Rural America by cutting critical investments in rural communities including direct loans to help hardworking Americans buy homes in rural areas, water and waste grants to help the poorest communities get safer water services, and energy savings programs that support rural small businesses. Republicans are also cutting funding that helps low- and very low-income rural homeowners repair or rehabilitate their homes. 
• Threatens access to food for hardworking and vulnerable Americans by cutting, underfunding, or altering critical food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP).
• Slashes Food for Peace to the lowest level since 2002 at a time when the Russian attack on Ukraine, conflicts on nearly every continent, and climate change are drastically endangering global food security.

After members provided opening remarks, Rep. Pingree and other members ultimately secured $4 million for the Office of Urban Agriculture in the Manager’s Amendment.

A summary of House Republicans’ 2025 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies bill is here. A fact sheet of the bill is here. 

The text of the bill, before the adoption of amendments in full Committee, is here. The bill report, before the adoption of amendments in full Committee, is here.

In Pingree’s district, 23,000 households depend on SNAP benefits each month, while over 3,000 pregnant and postpartum women and nearly 10,000 children participate in WIC. Despite the broad need in Maine and nationwide for these hunger relief programs, Congressional Republicans have pushed drastic cuts that would drive food insecurity rates skyward.

Pingree has been a stalwart defender of SNAP and WIC – demanding that these programs remain intact and pushing for funding increases. In an Agriculture Committee markup of the Farm Bill, Pingree highlighted the extreme cuts to SNAP and voted against the bill.

Farmers in Maine are also feeling the impacts of climate change firsthand. In January, Pingree hosted USDA Secretary Vilsack in Maine to discuss the impact of the winter storms and climate change.

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Mr. Chair. I'm very pleased to be a member of this subcommittee, and I appreciate working with the chair and ranking member, particularly when we have things that we agree on. Unfortunately, right now, I'm going to rise in opposition to this bill. In my opinion, this bill hurts farmers. It hurts rural communities like the ones I represent in Maine. And it puts nutrition programs at risk. And so much more. 

I'm sorry to see that it also feels a little bit like Groundhog Day with harmful riders from the initial FY 24 bill, many of which we removed in that bill eventually, but they are appearing again. Once again, it hurts our ability to fight the climate crisis by slashing funds for climate research.

It cuts the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, which is known as SARE, by $3 million. Since 2019, Maine has received over $3.5 million in funding from SARE – critically important to many of our small farmers, benefiting more than 5,000 farmers in my state. These funds have supported such things as wild blueberries, which I know you all love, hemp, potatoes, seaweed aquaculture and more.

 The bill also zeroes out funding for the Office of Urban Agriculture, which supports so much including composting and food waste reduction projects. Last week, they announced $5 million in grants to enhance urban agriculture and innovative production methods. Zero[ing] out funds for this office stifles innovation. It hurts urban and rural communities alike. 

I'm also very disappointed to see an $8 [million] cut to the Value-Added Producer Grant program. Farmers in my district have used these funds to help extend processing and marketing of their products, from goat milk to blueberry crisps. These grants play a crucial role in increasing and increasing farmer income, and this cut will impact farmers bottom lines. Once again, there's a rider to prevent the USDA from implementing the rules to protect farmers and ranchers from anti-competitive behavior in the meat and poultry industries.

These are commonsense changes to ensure fairness in competition, such as requiring poultry companies to be transparent with growers about how their pay is calculated. This was attempted in FY [24] and we blocked it. And we will continue to fight to stop this again. I do have concerns that, while the bill increases the WIC funding from FY 24 that the proposed $7.2 billion falls short of the president's budget request of $7.7 billion. At a time when food prices have risen dramatically,

We must ensure all eligible WIC participants can access nutritious food. I'm also deeply concerned that the $37 million cut for the Food Nutrition Service to carry out nutrition assistance programs. These funds are critical services ... they're used for critical services required to deliver the USDA’s 16 Nutrition Assistance programs, services like financial and grant management. This includes this new summer EBT program, which relies on this funding for implementation and oversight.

And the SNAP program relies on this fund to deter and prevent SNAP benefit theft and fraud. SNAP integrity is something I think both sides of the aisle find important, and when people are stretching every dollar to count at the grocery store, when SNAP benefits are just $6 a day, why would we tie the hands of the USDA? And why would we hamper their ability to ensure SNAP integrity?

The bill also provides only $80 million for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, $15 million below the requested level. In Maine, food insecurity grew nearly 3% from 2021 to 2022, and these TEFAP accounts develop accounts for nearly 20% of the food our food bank, the Good Shepherd Food Bank, distributes. And in 2022, only 35% of Good Shepherd's cost to distribute TEFAP were reimbursed. That forced the food bank to divert already scarce resources to fill in the gap.

We can and must do more to attempt to end hunger in this country, and this is going in the wrong direction.

Last, I was appalled to see the incredibly concerning water to allow the use of electric shock devices as treatment for people with disabilities in the language that passed at the subcommittee level. I'm glad the language was removed from the bill in the manager's amendment, and I'm committed to ensuring that the FDA has the ability to regulate these dangerous devices. 

The hour is late, I will yield back my last 22 seconds and again, thank the chair for recognizing me.

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