These are the dog days. Things are so slow in the capital that:
– Twenty minutes have passed without a fax from the Gary Bauer for President Campaign; 10 minutes without an e-mail from Steve Forbes.
– Rep. Robert Barr (R-Ga.) has not called for the impeachment of President Clinton in a week.
– The Tribune’s Washington television unit spent Friday laboring on a story about roller coaster safety.
– The Washington Post ran a front-page story Friday declaring that “New revelations about Russian money laundering through a major U.S. bank have presented Vice President Gore with a potentially difficult campaign issue and once again illustrated the pitfalls of running for the White House from the vice president’s chair.”
Huh?
– C-SPAN reran a 1995 profile of President James Buchanan, including a tour of Buchanan, Mich.
And, yet, Jasper Womach and Ralph Chite were at their desks Friday, very much live.
Yes, there is the reality of so much of “official Washington,” as well as the self-described “elite” press, being out of town. Congress is on summer recess, the Clintons are vacationing, the morning commute is a piece of cake, and bookers for public-policy talk shows scramble to find pundits of any stripe for any topic.
But there also is the fact that dutiful government employees such as Womach, 53, and Chite, 41, are around and doing intriguing, if arcane, work–and in the process revealing a dirty little secret about your elected representatives: They often vote on legislation whose details they don’t understand or even know.
Womach and Chite are stellar members of the Congressional Research Service, an independent federal agency that serves as a cheat sheet for politicians. It’s a place within the Library of Congress where representatives, senators and their yuppie-filled staffs, call for the straight scoop on laws and proposed legislation from sophisticated neutrals who earn their living doing big-time research.
And with politicians now back home (at least those not on taxpayer-subsidized junkets overseas), many find themselves at local meetings in which constituents ask questions they can’t fully answer. “I’ll have my staff get back to you,” they will answer in Pavlovian fashion, meaning an underling will call the research service.
“The number of those requests do drop off in the summer, but they are coming in,” said Womach.
He’s working on two matters. The first is a chapter in a larger effort on ethanol, precisely because it has been in the news of late because of environmental issues.
Central is whether one needs to oxygenate gas to achieve federal air quality standards. A National Academy of Sciences study concludes one doesn’t really have to, which raises questions about how much one needs ethanol, which can be used in the oxygenation process.
“Do we continue to mandate oxygenated fuels just to protect the ethanol industry?” asked Womach. “I’m doing a short chapter on the agricultural aspects; about the fact corn is used, where it’s produced and what kind of impact on corn prices there’d be if we produced less ethanol.”
The second matter is quite interesting too and relates largely to questions coming in from politicians in agricultural states who are talking to farmers confronting lower commodities prices.
There is pending before Congress a gargantuan $7.4 billion piece of farm assistance legislation that in aggregate will boost farm income–only a year after another $6 billion rescue package labeled then as a one-time fix.
“You start wondering what farmers are complaining about,” said Womach, an expert on the often unintelligible, once-every-five-years farm bill, replete as it is with sections on Findley Payments, flex acres, hydroponics, Swampbusters, Sodbusters, replacement heifers, milk marketing orders and stubble-mulching.
In the absence of this “emergency” assistance, which few politicians have the nerve to say “no” to, the latest statistics found by Womach show net cash income for 1999 to be forecast at $53.7 billion.
Yes, some folks are suffering low prices, notably those in hogs, corn, wheat, rice and cotton. But many others are doing very well. The fruit, vegetable, poultry and dairy folks are doing well.
“When you look at the aggregate numbers, you would not conclude that there is a crisis in American agriculture,” said Womach. Nevertheless, $7.4 billion likely will be doled out, much to folks who clearly are not suffering any economic hardship.
Of course, farm folks want to know about the legislation, so they ask their elected representatives, who probably don’t really know what they voted for.
“A lot of the questions for us end up being specific to individual constituents, with a politician’s office just needing some help,” said Womach, himself the child of a Washington state farm family.
Chite, who is trained as an economist, also is spending time on the emergency package, as well as on purported reform of a cornerstone of the agriculture bill, namely milk marketing orders.
“I’m trying to make sense of the assistance package since very few people actually saw it before it was offered (for a vote) on the (Senate) floor,” said Chite.
“Who would actually benefit from it? How would the money be made available? How exactly is it divided up among farm group interests?”
The bill, he found, is rather spare on specifics and leaves much for the Agriculture Department to sort out. “By and large, it calls for direct payments (to farmers), regardless of their individual situations.”
One more time. “There is no means testing at all” in the bill, said Chite. That is bureaucratese for money being doled out proportionately, whether farmers are in need or not.
As for milk marketing orders, a phrase Hillary Clinton has had to learn for her possible U.S. Senate campaign, they are a bizarre and complex system by which milk producers get paid.
The system sets up regional boundaries around milk-producing areas, with no distinct rationale to the boundaries (for example, it’s not based on states or counties). Those boundaries are a function of a mix of consuming and producing areas. One area, for example, is Tallahassee, Fla., as a result of being a consuming region surrounded by local dairy farms.
The marketing orders establish minimum prices that milk handlers, who buy from producers, pay for milk that goes into a fluid market, which means prices for liquid milk (not cheese or powdered milk).
The government aims to protect farmers and handlers from the vagaries of supply and demand since milk production is higher in spring than winter, while production is not quite in sync with seasonal consumption (for instance, schools tend to be out when production is high in summer).
Most any rational soul realizes that the system is nutty, with some regions, like upstate New York, getting higher prices than, say, producers in the upper Midwest, who feel they are discriminated against. Some reforms have been proposed by the Agriculture Department, to make everything more market oriented, though the plan faces stiff opposition (and, of course, pandering by prospective candidates such as Hillary Clinton, who supports those coddled New York farmers).
“They say that our dairy policies are written in a way that only nine people in Washington understand them and, of those, five aren’t telling the truth,” Chite said. “The whole thing makes your eyes glaze over.”
“Just look at this proposed reform!” Chite said. “It’s supposed to be reform, but it keeps me busy trying to explain how the changes would actually affect the current system. I can say this for sure: They surely don’t simplify the system.”
Still, it’s a reason Chite, like Womach, appears to love his work, meaning both get paid to think and analyze.
“Even in the dog days, it’s interesting,” said Chite. “Plus, the phone isn’t ringing off the hook.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.
