Ranking Member DeLauro Remarks: Fiscal Year 2027 Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and Related Agencies Subcommittee Markup

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) delivered the following remarks during the subcommittee markup for the fiscal year 2027 Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA, and Related Agencies funding bill:

I thank the Chairman, and Ranking Member Bishop for their work on this bill.

I also want to thank the subcommittee staff, Martha Foley, Marie Gualtieri, and Alex Swann on the minority side, and their counterparts on the majority as well for all their hard work.

I oppose the bill that is before this subcommittee today. It would raise costs on American farmers and working families, while cutting off crucial support for rural communities across the country.

This bill makes substantial cuts to food vouchers specifically for women, children, and infants – nearly 7 million of whom received assistance through this program in 2025. These are families with small children who are doing their best to make ends meet. As the cost of groceries go up with no end in sight, this program offers relief to those who are struggling to put food on the table. And we know that people are struggling to put food on the table.

The program also supports the farmers and grocers who grow and sell the fruits and vegetables these families can buy with their vouchers. Cutting back on this assistance will have a cascading economic impact that leaves everyone worse off. 

This bill cuts the Food for Peace program by $300 million – a 25 percent cut compared to 2026. It denies hungry children around the globe access to the assistance they desperately need, but it deprives our farmers of the additional revenue that they earn when they grow food to support the program. And I would just say if you don’t want to consider the hungry children around the world, I would hope you would care about what happened to US farmers and that you want to make sure they are justly be able to scratch out a living.

This bill cuts grant funding for waste and water development programs in rural communities. More than 2.2 million Americans do not have access to basic plumbing and running water in their homes, and this problem is more pronounced in rural communities. The point of these grants is to help address that issue. Instead, the bill slashes funding for these efforts by $62 million, leaving more and more Americans without access to the basic necessities of life we should all expect in the United States. 

This bill also eliminates the rural utility services, the high energy cost grants. The bill cuts loans under the Rural Energy for American program by 50 percent, while eliminating all grant funding. This program was created to help bring down energy costs for farmers, small businesses and rural communities. More than 25,000 projects have been funded through the program, helping people across all 50 states reduce their energy costs, and over two-thirds of grants have gone to Republican-led districts. Yet, the Republican bill we are considering today decimates the program, raising energy costs for their own constituents all across the country.

This bill does nothing to further protect our infants and better ensure infant formula safety, even in the wake of the ByHeart Botulism outbreak that surprised regulators and scared parents over the last few months. 

This bill leaves behind specialty crop, family, and small farmers while doing nothing to tackle the big agribusinesses that terrorize our farm economy and increase costs for the American consumer.

Lastly, this bill includes a variety of divisive policy riders. It eliminates protections for small meat and poultry producers – a gift to their larger corporate competitors. And it retreads partisan culture war provisions that have been stripped out of previous Ag-FDA bills, which discriminate against same sex couples.

In its current form, this bill raises costs for American farmers, takes food away from hungry families, cuts off support for rural communities, and loudly bangs the divisive culture-war drums once again. I encourage my colleagues to oppose this legislation and work with Democrats to fix the many serious problems it contains.