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Release No. 0044.03
Edited Transcript of
Fiscal Year 2004 Budget Briefing with Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman
and USDA Budget Officer Stephen B. Dewhurst
Washington, D.C.
Monday, February 3, 2003
"Now, let me first tell you
what this budget does. This budget is consistent with the administration's
policy book, Food and Agriculture Policy: Taking Stock for a New Century, and
it supports the Department's overall strategic plan. Both are designed to
enhance economic opportunities in agriculture as well as rural areas, protect
the nation's food supply, improve the Nation's nutrition and health and
protect and enhance the Nation's natural resources and environment.
"It also provides unprecedented funding
for the Food and Nutrition Safety Net. It provides resources to continue to
expand agricultural trade. It increases the amount of money for housing for
rural citizens and invests in America's rural sector. It strengthens forest
health and fire-fighting capabilities, and it improves USDA's program
delivery and customer service.
"In
addition, $200 million is requested for the national research initiative. Additional
funding is also provided for improving the quality and reliability of our
agricultural statistics.
"The budget also includes $200 million
for the national research initiative and funding for initiatives on genomics.
"New and expanded programs include $2
billion for the Conservation Reserve Program; that's an increase of $139
million; $850 million for the EQIP program, which is an increase of $255
million.
"$250 million for the Wetlands Reserve
Program to enroll an additional 200,000 acres. $112 million for the Farmland
Protection Program, an increase of about $27 million, and another $165
million for the Grassland Reserve Program, the ground and surface water
conservation, the Wildlife Habitant Incentives Program, the new Conservation
Security Program, and water conservation and water quality enhancements in
the Klamath Basin of Oregon and California.
"The budget maintains the NRCS base
conservation technical assistance program that supports locally-led,
voluntary conservation efforts, which are the foundation of the partnership
that has been developed
"The 2004
budget continues a strong commitment to export promotion and foreign market
development efforts by proposing $6.2 billion in spending as you can see here
by this chart.
"Since this administration took office,
these programs have experienced significant growth, increasing by $957
million, or an 18 percent increase since fiscal year 2001.
"Included in our trade budget is
funding for USDA's market development programs, including the Market Access
and Cooperator Programs, which are increased by $15 million.
"The budget establishes a new
centralized fund of $6.6 million to support important cross- cutting trade
issues, compliance monitoring, dispute resolution and biotechnology
activities within the Department.
"These areas have been even more
critical as we have seen a number of trade disputes over the last couple of
years.
"A program level of $4.2 billion is
provided for the Commodity Credit Corporation export credit guarantee
activities.
"So as
you can see, this is a budget that the administration continues to provide in
it strong support for our international and trade development activities.
"The 2004 fiscal year budget proposal
also strengthens forest health and firefighting capabilities. It proposes
$4.9 billion for U.S. Forest Service programs.
"The budget includes the highest level
ever requested for fire suppression and dramatically increases efforts to
improve forest health through the President's healthy forest initiative.
"The goal of the initiative is to
promote timely decisions, greater efficiency, and better results.
"By removing regulatory and management
obstacles, the Department aims to treat more acres and constrain future
catastrophic fire losses.
"Approximately $1.57 billion is
requested for the National Fire Plan, an increase of $173 million over fiscal
year 2003.
"We are committed to increase efforts
to fight wildfires, to reduce the risk of fire, and to assist communities.
"The Forest Legacy Program is funded at
$90.8 million, which is a $21 million increase.
"Finally, the budget supports the
Department's strategic plan and supports several management initiatives to
better integrate computer systems and technology to provide employees and
customers the necessary tools to efficiently operate and deliver services.
"The 2004 budget will allow us to build
upon our progress and our management priorities by providing resources needed
to improve customer service through continued technology modernization
efforts.
"The budget includes $178 million for
FY 2004, an increase of nearly $45 million, to upgrade technology in county
office service centers.
"Most of the increase will be used to
provide geographic information systems technologies to these offices, which
will allow farmers and ranchers to access satellite mapping and planting
information. Currently, so many of these maps are held in the county offices,
basically all pen and ink, and our goal is to get these on the computers so
they're useable and interactive as soon as possible, because we believe it
will help us provide better delivery of services to our farmers and ranchers.
"To summarize, the 2004 budget is a
responsible budget and it funds key priorities and programs here at USDA by
focusing funds on our key priorities here at USDA. It provides record level
funding for farm conservation programs, food safety and nutrition programs.
"It represents overall growth of about
2 percent over the previous year but more than 8 percent since the
administration took office just two years ago.
"So, again, I want to thank you all for
being here and I'll be happy to take a few questions before I turn it over to
our expert budget team to answer the more specific questions for you.
"Thank you all again for being here.
There's one behind you first, Chuck; sorry. Glad you put your tie on, though.
[Laughter.]
QUESTION: Hi, Madam Secretary. Mike Soreghan
with the Denver Post. On the Forest Service, you mentioned strengthening
forest [sic] fighting capabilities. Just checking some math, you have an
overall, I think, decrease in funding for he Forest Service, and when you
take out suppression, which you fund to completion essentially, the wildland
fire management, I can see where the Forest Service is flat.
So is that really strengthening forest
capabilities in forest fires?
SECRETARY VENEMAN: "Well, again, I'm not
sure if you were here during the last briefing, but one of the things that I
think shows up in our budget, and if I'm correct on this, is because we had
such huge forest fires in two of the last four years, or so, we saw some
increases in the budget which will show up in subsequent years because they
get added in, but in fact the firefighting budget is based upon a ten-year
average and so reflects that ten-year average, but we do have, I believe, the
highest levels of money allocated for firefighting that we've had in the
budget in the past.
"Want to add anything? Mr. Steve
Dewhurst, our expert budget--
MR. DEWHURST: Two things. One is when you
look at the details of the Forest Service budget, what you're going to find
is that there are some tradeoffs within the total. Things like land
acquisition are down a bit, investment in operating funds are up a bit. So
it's valid to say we're putting more money into the operation and the
improvements of our current domain.
The fire-fighting numbers are based on
averages. We have a 10-year average. We figure each year into the average,
and then we [inaudible] convention is we budget for the average. So that's
what we have done here. Everybody knows if we get a bigger fire season, we're
going to have to do something about more money, but for purposes of the
budget, we always budget the average. And since the average is going up, our
request is the highest we've ever had in a front-end budget.
QUESTION: Can I follow up? Why don't we
assimilate our increase for fuel production?
MR. DEWHURST: Let me bring up our
reinforcements here.
MR. REY: I'm Mark Rey, the Under Secretary
for Natural Resources and Environment.
What you see in both our budget and
Interior's budget is a modest but I think significant increase in fuels
reduction work, and we have some carryover money from 2003 or 2002 that we'll
be using for fuels reduction work this coming year. It was carryover because
as the fire season continued to worsen, we had to take people off of fuel
reduction projects and put them on fire lines. So if you add those into the
picture, you'll have a pretty robust fuel reduction budget.
Additionally, we expect that by the time we
are into 2004, that many of the process reforms that are part of the
President's Healthy Forest Initiative will have been completed, and that our
unit cost for fuels reduction work will decrease significantly, thereby
making those dollars go a lot further than they would under today's
practices.
QUESTION: On your IT budget and the common
computing environment, what is the request like and what are you hoping to
accomplish with it?
SECRETARY VENEMAN: "Let me just go--we
had, as I stated, we have about a $45 million increase to upgrade technology
in county office service centers. But let me just say on our technology
budget, we are absolutely committed to improving technology not only within
this Department but also to implementing Egovernment to the maximum extent
that we can, because we think it helps those who are our constituent groups
in the field.
"I mean, these programs, as many people
have said, you know, the farm bill that we now have is as complicated,
probably, as we've ever had.
"With these new conservation programs
we hope to get as much of this farm program information online as possible,
because we think it will help people not only to administer programs but our
farmers and ranchers to be able to access the programs.
"We, right now, have, for the most
part, maps of farms, separate sets of maps for FSA and NRCS. We are trying to
integrate all of that mapping system so that you have consistent sets of
information, utilized interagency and with the farmers, and I think all of
that is a win-win for our Department and for our farmers and ranchers.
QUESTION: Maureen Groppe with Gannett News
Service. Can you address any other areas of decrease other than the ones that
were mentioned on rural development?
SECRETARY VENEMAN: "Overall, we have an
increase in this budget. There are certain areas that decrease, I think one
of them that was mentioned earlier by Mr. Rey was our land acquisition
programs in the Forest Service.
"There are areas where we had to set
priorities, but keep in mind, again, this USDA budget is about an 8 percent increase
over the budget since we took office two years ago and we continue to believe
that it is a budget that really addresses the priorities and we've had to
make some tough choices, and we want to continue to work with Congress to
establish a 2004 budget that really is workable for the programs that we
administer and for what we need to do for the future.
"Thank you all very much and I will now
turn it over to my very able director of our Budget and Policy Office, Steve
Dewhurst.
"But thank you all very much for being
here.
STAFF: Other questions?
MR. DEWHURST: You cannot ask me the same
question you were thinking about.
[Laughter.]
QUESTION: Chuck Abbott again, with Reuters.
I'm curious. The last page of the budget book, which we all learned to read,
just like you look at the back of the index [inaudible] see if you're
mentioned, here, in Washington, it proposes to cap spending on the
Conservation Security Program.
Is that a contradiction of the Secretary's
statement that the administration is committed to conservation on working
lands, and why are you proposing it?
MR. DEWHURST: The answer to the first
question is no. The answer to your second question is a bit more complicated,
I'm afraid.
The authorization levels for these
conservation programs always assumed that we would use those authorization
levels for both the financial assistance we give to farmers and the technical
assistance the NRCS provides to support those programs.
We have had a legal opinion from the Justice
Department, that we may not use mandatory funds for the technical assistance.
So what we've had to do in this budget, and, frankly, what is contained in
the '03 budget amendment the President has sent to the Congress, is we have
created a separate fund for the technical assistance, and we have capped
various of the conservation programs at their authorized financial assistance
levels.
So that we can do both things. We cannot
deliver these programs without the technical assistance.
So the chart you see here includes both the financial and technical
assistance.
We're capping the Conservation Security
Program at the level it was scored when the Congress passed the bill.
There are caps on some of the other programs.
But all that does is distinguish between the amount of money we can give to
farmers and the amount of money we have to have for the technical assistance.
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