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• Promote legislative fixes to address abuse. Ideally, Congress would repeal the Secretary’s discretionary authority under section 5 of the Charter Act. There is no reason to maintain such authority. If Congress needs to spend money to assist farmers, it has legislative tools, including the farm bill and the annual appropriations process, to do so in a timely fashion. While not an ideal solution, Congress could also amend the Charter Act to require prior congressional approval through duly enacted legislation before any money is spent.

At a minimum, Congress should amend the Charter Act to:

• Limit spending to directly help farmers and ranchers address issues due to unforeseen events not already covered by existing programs and that constitute genuine emergencies that must be addressed immediately.

• Prohibit the CCC from being used to assist parties beyond farmers and ranchers.

• Clarify that spending is only to address problems that are temporary in nature and ensure that funding is targeted to address such problems.

• Tighten the discretion within section 5 and identify ways for improper application of the Charter Act to be challenged in court.

Reform Farm Subsidies. Too often, agricultural policy becomes synonymous with farm subsidy policy. This is unfortunate, because making them synonymous fails to recognize that agricultural policy covers a wide range of issues, including issues that are outside the proper scope of the USDA, such as environmental regulation.

However, there is no question that farm subsidies are an important issue within agricultural policy that should be addressed by any incoming Administration. There are several principles that even subsidy supporters would likely agree upon, including the need to reduce market distortions. Subsidies should not influence planting decisions, discourage proper risk management and innovation, incentivize planting on environmentally sensitive land, or create barriers to entry for new farmers. Farm subsidies can lead to these market distortions and therefore, it would hardly be controversial to ensure that any subsidy scheme should be designed to avoid such problems.

The overall goal should be to eliminate subsidy dependence. Despite what might be conventional wisdom, many farmers receive few to no subsidies, with most subsidies going to only a handful of commodities. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), from 2014 to 2016, 94 percent of farm program