By Tony Eberhard, IDFA Vice President of Legislative Affairs

Welcome to “Hill of Beans,” a periodic update by Tony Eberhard about the association’s work in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to advance dairy industry priorities. After working on the Hill for various members of Congress and senators since 2001, Eberhard gives IDFA readers a former Hill staffer’s take on what is going on and how it affects our priorities.

“There is a lot of work being done in the House and Senate that never makes the headlines but affects members’ bottom lines, and I’m hoping these updates will prove useful to you and your organization,” Eberhard said. “I’m titling these updates ‘Hill of Beans’ because to many in national media this information might not amount to much, but to our industry’s agenda in Congress, it is critical.” Read the update below.

Winning the Pre-Conference

If you’re ever channel surfing, get lost in the hundreds of channels available and end up on one of the C-SPANs, you might run into a recording of an appropriations conference committee. Should you be overcome with a sudden rush of civic duty, you may even watch long enough to notice that the only thing happening during the conference committee is that a lot opening statements are given along with the customary nod to bipartisanship from the appropriations committee leaders. You might ask, “Where are the debates? What about amendments and voting?”

There are a lot of healthy debates in appropriations conference negotiations; it’s just that the action is almost always behind the scenes. When you see an appropriations committee conference committee meeting on TV, it’s because a lot of work went on, in private, for months to get both houses of Congress within striking distance of a final conference agreement.

Most everyone remembers from civics class that when a bill passes the House of Representatives and a separate version passes the Senate, the differences between those two bills are resolved in a conference committee. Clearly, conference committees are important, especially when, as in the case of IDFA’s appropriations agenda, you have part of what you want in the House version and part of what you want in the Senate version. Yet, a good deal of the pivotal negotiations occurs behind the scenes prior to the convening of an official conference, a process known as pre-conferencing. Winning the day in pre-conference negotiations is critical to getting what you need in the final bill.

That’s why, with months to go before an agriculture appropriations bill would likely be signed into law, IDFA is already working to build support with key conference negotiators for our two appropriations priorities. While IDFA has strong language in both the House and Senate agriculture appropriations bills, ideally, the final bill will include the $3 million from the House bill to address standards of identity and the $1.5 million from the Senate bill to conduct research on ice cream waste.

IDFA’s June appropriations fly-in last month put us on good footing going into pre-conference negotiations because our International Ice Cream Association board members had constructive conversations with both the House and Senate chairmen of the agriculture appropriations subcommittees. These chairmen are the lead negotiators in pre-conference discussions. The fly-in also reinforced support for our priorities with key IDFA appropriations champions who will be instrumental in delivering the message about the importance of our priorities to the House and Senate appropriations committees.

All this means you don’t need to worry about trying to locate C-SPAN3 later this year to find out if IDFA’s priorities made it into the agriculture appropriations conference agreement. On the other hand, if you do want to be part of the pre-conference action, the IDFA team will gladly help you get involved. You’ve got to admit, it beats channel surfing.