	Farm Bill Programs Without Baseline After FY2012

The 2008 farm bill (the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, P.L. These amounts were nearly 3% of the $484 billion five-year baseline available to write the 2014 farm bill, or 14% of the $100 billion five-year baseline if the nutrition title was excluded. Notable programs among this group were certain agricultural disaster programs, specialty crop research, organic research and certification, beginning/socially disadvantaged farmer programs, rural development, bioenergy, farmers market promotion, and some conservation programs. However, some programs may not be assumed to continue in the budget baseline beyond the end of a farm bill because:
the program did not receive new mandatory budget authority during the last year of a farm bill, or the baseline during the last year of a farm bill is below a minimum $50 million scoring threshold that is needed to continue a baseline, or the Budget Committees and Agriculture Committees did not agree to give the program a baseline in the years beyond the end of the farm bill—either to reduce the program's 10-year cost at the time the farm bill was written, or to prevent it from having a continuing baseline. Status in the 2014 Farm Bill of the 2008 Farm Bill Programs Without Baseline

The enacted 2014 farm bill provides 29 of these 37 programs with new mandatory funding that totals more than $6.2 billion over the five-year period FY2014-FY2018 ( Table 1 ). An estimated $9 billion to $14 billion would be needed to continue these programs for five more years. Congress needed to find offsets from other sources to continue them, a difficult task in a tight budget environment. The gap in mandatory funding during FY2013 for many of these programs was not necessarily intended.
The 2008 farm bill (the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, P.L. 110-246 provided mandatory funding for many programs. Some of these programs had budget baseline beyond the end of the farm bill in FY2012, while others did not. Those with continuing baseline essentially had built-in future funding if policy makers decided that the programs should continue.
However, 37 programs that received mandatory funds during the 2008 farm bill were not assumed to continue from a budgetary perspective because they did not have a budgetary baseline beyond FY2012. Notable programs among this group included certain agricultural disaster assistance programs, specialty crop research, organic research and certification, beginning and socially disadvantaged farmer programs, rural development, bioenergy, farmers market promotion programs, and some conservation programs. If policy makers wanted to continue these programs in the 2014 farm bill, they needed to pay for the programs with budgetary offsets.
Depending on the approach used to estimate the cost to extend the 37 programs for five years, an estimated $9 billion to $14 billion of offsets from other sources was needed. This was nearly 3% of the five-year CBO baseline used to write the 2014 farm bill (FY2014-FY2018), or 14% of the five-year baseline if the nutrition title is excluded. Finding this level of offsets sometimes was difficult in a tight budget environment, especially when many observers believed that some of the farm bill baseline would be used for deficit reduction.
The enacted 2014 farm bill provides 29 of these 37 programs with new mandatory funding that totals $6.2 billion over the five-year period FY2014-FY2018.