{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-sen-rand-paul-highlights-federal-insurance-boondoggle-costing-310-million-annually/", "Sen. Rand Paul Highlights a Federal Insurance Boondoggle Costing $310 Million Annually", "2015-06-29", "2015", "2015-06", "Republican", "Senate", "KY", "Rand Paul", "P000603", "www.paul.senate.gov", "paul", "https://www.paul.senate.gov/news/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, D.C. \u2013 U.S. Senator Rand Paul today released the newest edition to \u2018The Waste Report.\u2019 \u2018The Waste Report\u2019 is an ongoing project to catalog egregious examples of wasteful spending throughout the U.S. government.\n\nThis week\u2019s edition of \u2018The Waste Report,\u2019 exposes a loophole in the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u2019s (USDA) crop insurance program, costing American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Each year, the USDA pays out on crop insurance claims for \u201cprevented planting\u201d to farmers who cannot plant their crops due to extreme weather. However, exploiting the generality of law, farmers with seasonal wetlands that regularly flood in planting season but dry other times, are raking in approximately $310 million annually in crop insurance payments.\n\n\u2018The Waste Report\u2019 can be found HERE or below.\n\nThe U.S. Department of Agriculture \u2013 \u2018The Waste Report\u2019\n\nInsurance protects against the rare and unforeseen, not the regular and predictable. You insure your car against accident, not oil change.\n\nBut, when the government is the insurer, this kind of obvious logic does not apply. Surprisingly (or maybe not), the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is paying out hundreds of millions of dollars annually in \u201cprevented planting\u201d crop insurance to farmers who cannot plant their corps in SEASONAL WETLANDS.[1]\n\nAt issue is the intersection of the \u201cprevented planting\u201d crop insurance and prairie potholes. What are prairie potholes? They are basically ground depressions that fill with water in the rainy spring and dry out in the summer and fall, and are mostly located in the upper-Midwest. The \u201cprevented planting\u201d program is taxpayer subsidized crop insurance that compensates farmers when extreme weather prevents planting.\n\nThe problem is, some farmers claim prevented planting each year for the regular flooding of prairie potholes.[2] In fact, farmers in sixty-five counties, mostly in the Dakotas, have gotten payouts; 14 years in a row, and in another twenty-nine counties have gotten payments 13 of the last 14 years. In most cases, insurance payments were greater what direct crop subsidies would have been.[3] These farmers are raking in approximately $310 million annually.\n\nNo private insurer would stand for this and would either not offer insurance or would control for this kind of abuse. To their credit, the USDA is not complacent in this abuse. Several attempts have been made to close the prairie pothole loophole. As recently as last year, USDA \u201cclarified\u201d rules to effectively prohibit claims four years in a row.[4] But data suggests this new policy could be gamed. At the heart of the problem is that USDA simply does not have a definition of \u201cnormal\u201d weather.[5]\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-08T20:17:59Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-sen-rand-paul-highlights-federal-insurance-boondoggle-costing-310-million-annually/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.7801561150699854, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}