Advocate Summary

Issue:  US Farm Bill
Advocate:  Ducks Unlimited – David Gagner
Date of Interview: 7/16/02

Basic Background
Ducks Unlimited along with the conservation community was concerned with four programs, I’ll put them in order of importance for DU, WRP is the most important, Wetlands Reserve, the next program probably almost equal maybe to a lesser extent on the lobbying end we probably didn’t lobby as hard just because the possibilities were less in this far bill but that is the CRP program, Conservation Reserve, then the WHIP program, Wildlife and Habitat In (sp? ) Program, and then you had the grasslands preserve program.  So those were our main four focuses, that’s not to say we didn’t have input on the Conservation Security Program or Farmland protection or watershed this or that, all those things we had some interest in but we focused on four programs. I’ve been working for DU for about 14 or 15 months now, and came on really as the farm bill started going, but I was representing the National Association of Conservation Districts before that so for me I changed jobs but did the same work, I just basically had a different pay check, and there was a slight difference in focus in terms of the conservation title but it was very exciting.  

Prior Activity on the Issue 
[Were active on the 1996 Farm Bill]

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
A lot of people in the conservation community started getting things together probably about two years ago and really started aggressively trying to figure out where they wanted to go. They picked the four programs, they picked DU to testify twice in front of Congress, kind of represent the core group, which ranged anywhere from twenty organizations to fifty plus organization depending on how many people you could get signed on to a letter or testimony. It ranged from the Rocky Mountain Elk Organization, Quale Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, American Sports and Fishing, to the NRA, most people don’t realize the NRA actually has a very large conservation division within their organization, the hunting and fishing communities – sportsmen communities is what they like to be called because these folks get out there, they go hunting, they go fishing, they buy their licenses and they put more money back into the ground than any other organization, bird watchers don’t come close, because bird watching you don’t have to buy a license to do it. If you go hunting, I went hunting in South Dakota earlier this year with Senator Daschle, the license alone for a three day license was like 140 dollars and that all goes to that State Fish and Wildlife agency. And they put that all back into the ground, doing habitat, working with organizations like ours. So it is a very aggressive community in terms of habitat. I’m a very new hunter, and one of my buddies said you should try it and now I’m addicted. I love getting up early in the morning, and I can’t tell you how great it is, I get up at 3 am and drive out to the Eastern Shore of Maryland I’m out in the water, freezing cold water in January, with my waders on, that weren’t cheap, but they do put money back into the habitat – that company does, but the whole time, you’re putting decoys out and maybe fifty percent of the time we were out this year we actually got a bird, but just to get out there, I think in part it’s the DC disease just to get heck away from DC, but anyway, Farm bill. We had all those organizations, it was fairly organized we’d have meetings or calls once a week, a lot of email traffic. We picked specific members we were tight with, everybody tried to take those. And we focused on those pieces and parts. In the House they knew what they wanted very early on in the game, we didn’t like some of their things, we battled it out, we did get everything we wanted, we got some compromises, they had to give up some things they didn’t want to give up, great, I mean that’s how it’s supposed to be. I think in the back of the mind of the House guys, they knew we’d get more money, acreage, programmatic functions in the Senate, they knew that’s the nature of the Senate, so they thought, if we keep our numbers here and they have there numbers there then we’ll meet in the middle during conference and we know exactly where we’ll be at and I think that’s exactly where it ended up. I think the smartest people during this whole thing were the House guys, Bill O-Connor, the guy that leads the House Ag, he knew, he knew that during conference they would give and take and end up where he knew it would end up and he directed things down that path the whole time. I think the guy’s a genius, and he hates us so. He dislikes us because we went through for a gambit in the House that was in the 1996 farm bill. The ploy being that we would have another bill, ready to go, and basically in our pocket that we could pull out during the floor and take it to a vote, well we lost by 20 votes this time around. Last time around it never got to the floor, Gengrich and Boehlert and Congressman Roberts at the time Senator Roberts now, Roberts says, they don’t have the votes and Congressman Boehlert goes “yeah, we got the votes.” So we went with Boehlert again, he’s a good friend of ducks, we pulled that ploy with Boehlert, Congressman Dingell from Michigan, Mr. (Ron) Kind of Wisconsin (D) and Mr. (Wayne) Gilchrest (R-MD), two Republicans two Democrats, a lot of people referred to it as the Kind Initiative because that was the first version that was out, the lead though on the bill was Boehlert because it’s a Republican run house and that’s the way you play the game, but like I said all four of those members are very good friends of ducks. This was a combination of small farm organizations or environmental organizations and conservation/wildlife organizations that teamed up on this. I truly think if everyone had stayed on the team we would have been okay, but they were scared basically threw in the towel early, the House Ag guys, Bill O’Conner and such gave up some, they said we’ll give you this, well you know what that actually helped us too. Some of our friends that stayed out there in the middle or on the other side, they got paid off with things we wanted anyway. So we ended up kind of winning, kind of losing. It would have been great if we got the other dollars, but I truly don’t know if we would have ever been able to implement it, it was too big. I said that from the very beginning with some of the environmental organizations, and they said “no, we need more, more, more” but the reality is those guys don’t put the programs on the ground, we do and the way it stands now, the reality is what we ended up with we’re still having a problem right now putting it on the ground. And if we are having problems now with those programs, and they were giving us more, my gosh where would we be tomorrow. They would take those dollars in a heartbeat.  Anyway so the gambit went all the way to the floor, they thought they had the votes till the very last day, we had the votes, and they went in and strong armed a couple members, they threatened the Congressional Black Caucus, I mean bringing that into the farm bill was phenomenal, and were able to pull some Chicago votes, some of the inner city Chicago voters and New York members of congress and they ended up winning by twenty. I mean a ten vote swing and we’ve got it, we win, game over, so it was pretty darn close, it was really, really exciting, and we went and had a beer afterwards and lamented our loss. And then the Senate happened, we kind of separated from the environmentalists at that point, just because we took some pretty heavy duty damage as an organization, we lost money, we lost members, we didn’t really loose any friends on the Hill, they knew why we did it. Everyone knew we went for the Boehlert strategy and you know what it came close, they just weren’t willing to compromise at that point because they knew that they’d have to compromise in conference – that if they went higher than the Senate would go even higher and then they would have to compromise at such a level they wouldn’t be able to do it. We had compromised dollars that are almost exactly as the final bill ended up. One night, before it went to vote I got a call at home, I know some members and I know their families, but it’s not everyday that they call me at home, I got calls at home that night from a member, saying “I need you to get these guys on the phone, lets conference them all in”, two other guys from our office were both out to dinner with another member, and I got them on a conference call and we literally worked out a deal with the House Ag guys but then they withdrew it that next morning. We had all these wildlife conservation groups in this member’s office, ready to sign a letter, that I had written that night, in the middle of the night, to say “we agree with these terms and we agree with your farm bill” and then they withdrew it. And they withdrew it because they knew the compromise then would have to be even higher and they figured they would battle it out. It was a good strategy, it worked for them. We were very disappointed and I think that caused our community to work that much harder to win, which hurt us kind of in the end. But that’s okay, it hurt us it helped us. It hurts us that some of the House Ag guys still don’t talk to us. They took it personally, and some of them are still members of DU so it doesn’t really matter. There’s a ton of members of congress that are members of the organization so we’re not that concerned. 
	Then the Senate happened. We’ve always had a very good relationship with nearly every member of the Senate Ag committee, these are people I have over for dinner, they’re friends, it goes beyond work. Probably split pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats, we are obviously very tight with Harkin’s office. They wanted us to push CSP, we’re not willing to push CSP right now, it’s not one of our priorities. Allison, the lead staffer on conservation over there, she’s great, a very dear friend, and as well yelled at each other over time, she knew that I wasn’t going to sign these big lofty letters that CSP needs to be the focus of the bill. I told them that we wouldn’t oppose it and we’d say good things about it in member’s offices and she was going to support my things too. I also ran into Senator Harkin at GNC and we had a nice long talk it was on the weekend, bottom line, he was very supportive of those programs. And I’ll tell you what if it was not for his efforts, a lot of people deserted us, and I truly believe if not for Harkin conservation would have been lost. It really had to do with the fact that it was unbelievably political. I don’t know if the bill would have passed if it had gone the other way, if it had gone more political, you had to fight tooth and nail for every dime you got for conservation and I don’t think enough organizations give him credit. They were angry at the way the style that office did things, you know suck it up, it’s Capitol Hill, it’s gonna be evil sometimes, it has to be, it’s just the nature of the business, you can’t take things personally. There is probably only one person I don’t get along with after the farm bill and that’s just because he was very unprofessional about things but everybody else, we’re still great friends and probably more so because we were in the trenches together. The farm bill was nearly unlike anything else on Capitol Hill, it’s like ISTE or the Energy bill, they’re evil. Some staff, especially some younger staff where this is their first conference, they don’t understand you’re gonna compromise, you have to get the bill through. Then there are others, hardliners, that will say I’m not going to compromise on anything and it’ll get held up. You have to figure out what you are willing to compromise on and what you’re not willing to compromise on. It’s the things that you’re willing to compromise on that you play with and that’s where you get into trouble. In the Senate Harkin did his thing, it went all the way through. We liked the Roberts version of the farm bill, I would have liked to see that as the final bill, we worked with the White House on that. This was during committee that it came out but it just wasn’t going to work. We did that with the folks downstairs Cattleman’s Beef, they were in there Rice was in there, Cotton was in there a number of other organizations, conservation organizations, Pheasants and a couple of others, there was a core group of organizations that were willing to work on that bill, it just wasn’t going anywhere. Democrats were very hard-line behind Harkin, he had paid off Miller, Miller needed the peanut stuff – gave him that, Leahy got his milk stuff and on and on, so bottom line they got their bill. It came out of the committee, went to the floor, the battle wasn’t that tough there, we knew it was going to pass before hand. The biggest question was cloture they ended up having it. Game over, we were in conference. That went on forever, I swear some of those people didn’t have a weekend off accept for Easter weekend for 2 months. It was every single day, 12 to 16 hour days, they got tired of people like us bringing them food, they were like “no we’ve got enough it’s okay.” It was a tough battle. It was one of those things where I’d have my phone with me all weekend long, “what if we did this, what if we did that” it was a very big re-write because it was 1300 pages and the House version was right around 400, they had to combine those. So that was a real challenge in itself. The Senate version had some really out of this world programs, the payment limitation stuff, the meat packer stuff, all kinds of things. The conservation stuff, Title I the commodity stuff was much tougher, Title II was tough, and it did hold things up a little bit. 
	Oh I’ll tell you about the administration’s role, they started off really slow on this, they weren’t involved they had other focuses. They started getting rolling at the end of July last year, they started hiring people and the House was nearly done, they had been committed. Now we were in August recess and a lot of work was being done out in the field talking to staff. Then they hired Chuck Conner to staff them, Chuck used to work for Lugar so he was a really policy wonk on this stuff. Their involvement though because it was so late never really came to fruition. In the end the conference ended, the president signed it, it was a very nice signing. We were touted as an organization that worked on both sides. This one got very party oriented. We were also between the whole enviro-commodity thing that was going on. That’s kind of the role this organization plays in the first place. Our membership is so diverse it’s not even funny. We have some very liberal people that know that we are probably the best organization out there for putting wildlife habitat on the ground in the United States, we do conservation I think better than anybody, because we have the people to do it we have the biologists, we have the hydrologists, our folks are just greats, the biologist that used to head up the National Zoo, now she works for us, she’s running our bird studies now. So we’re very proud of that. There are so many members of congress that are members, that are duck hunters or want to be duck hunters, people like Senator Blanch Lincoln that wants us to take her kids duck hunting in the area, she’s a big duck hunter, Arkansas is a huge hunting state. 

Some of our lobbying tactics, we had a lot of meetings. We took a number of members of Congress out to dinner. We are big believers of sitting down with someone for lunch or a meal just because then you get them for at least an hour, where you can sit there and talk in a relaxed atmosphere and have a better amount of time. If you go in for an office talk they are going to get more phone calls more disruptions and less time, so overall you time is negligible. You really want to have more time with them, so that’s how we played it. It works for us, there are some members of congress we consider more friends than it’s just a member of congress you know. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
None mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
So we went with Boehlert again, he’s a good friend of ducks, we pulled that ploy with Boehlert, Congressman Dingell from Michigan, Mr. (Ron) Kind of Wisconsin (D) and Mr. (Wayne) Gilchrest (R-MD), two Republicans two Democrats, a lot of people referred to it as the Kind Initiative because that was the first version that was out, the lead though on the bill was Boehlert because it’s a Republican run house and that’s the way you play the game, but like I said all four of those members are very good friends of ducks.

…we are obviously very tight with Harkin’s office. They wanted us to push CSP, we’re not willing to push CSP right now, it’s not one of our priorities. Allison, the lead staffer on conservation over there, she’s great, a very dear friend, and as well yelled at each other over time, she knew that I wasn’t going to sign these big lofty letters that CSP needs to be the focus of the bill. I told them that we wouldn’t oppose it and we’d say good things about it in member’s offices and she was going to support my things too. I also ran into Senator Harkin at GNC and we had a nice long talk it was on the weekend, bottom line, he was very supportive of those programs. And I’ll tell you what if it was not for his efforts, a lot of people deserted us, and I truly believe if not for Harkin conservation would have been lost.

We did a lot of work with Harkin’s office, Lugar’s office, Colin Peterson in the House, Mike Thompson of California, McHugh of New York, half the Ohio delegation, Senator Frist of Tennessee, it goes on and on and on, I could name you forty more members if I got the books out. 

Targets of Direct Lobbying
None mentioned.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned. 

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
It ranged from the Rocky Mountain Elk Organization, Quail Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, American Sports and Fishing, to the NRA, most people don’t realize the NRA actually has a very large conservation division within their organization, the hunting and fishing communities

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
[So what was your relationship to the environmental groups arguing against price supports and resulting overproduction?]
I have a good friend at EWG (Environmental Working Group) Susanne Fleet. DU, we really slowed down on the payment limitation stuff it just wasn’t our interest. In the Kind, Dingell, Boehlert thing we were using a payment limitation thing to get the money to increase our conservation dollars, boy that didn’t sit well, that’s where people came after us, still do to this day. Part of the environmental community was just wimpy, out of touch not in the game. Groups like Environmental Defense and EWG, they were all over the place but where was Sierra Club, where was NRDC, where was Citizen Action, where was Union of Concerned Scientists and such? They weren’t even in existence, I mean they came to an occasional meeting but I’m just being very blunt by I thought they were just useless. They did nothing, and they supposedly have this great big machine out there, you know what they just didn’t get the job done. They just simply did not get the job done. Environmental Defense and EWG they were the groups that did the work. NWF was there, they changed staff people halfway though so that slowed them down a little bit, so I’m not going to bash them. But they were involved to a greater extent than those other organizations. TNC like to think of themselves more as conservation, and they are, they hung out with us, they didn’t hang out with the environmentalists at all. And I don’t know if they are as welcomed anymore in that community because they’ve gotten so big. They are preserving more than anyone else Robert Redford just gave another half million dollars.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
That we lose wetlands, that we’re not a partisan title, that George Bush number one said no net loss of wetlands, we’re not meeting that yet, we’re still losing wetlands. Now, as much as we are conserving and restoring, we’re still losing them. So how do we deal with that problem. One of the arguments we use with folks is, “do you want to have more ESA issues in your district?” Set up habitat, set up programs that allow the species to do okay because otherwise you are going to have future problems in your district and ESA is not going to get touched so you might as well do it. That’s kind of an underling threat, that habitat is the solution to not having ESA problems. On the other hand we just talk about how a number of the programs have had very good success. We can show that they are going in the right direction, we can show that wildlife numbers are improving in certain parts of the country. We can show wildlife numbers decreasing in certain parts of the country. We can show why in a lot of cases, like quail, they aren’t getting the type of habitat they need, some work was done in this farm bill to get that habitat. That’s the basic thing, that it’s good for the animals. And that the farm bill is not just about the commodities, where the commodities say it’s just about farming, but you know what farming, and rural communities and agriculture are interrelated, you can’t ignore these things. And they have water quality issues. Our programs help them on their water quality issues, our programs help them improve the water quality. Water quality is always a talking point, just the environmental aspects. There are some rules coming out TMDL, total maximum daily load and the AFO, Animal Feeding Operations, CNMPs, Certified Nutrient Management Plants these are things people are going to have to do on the farm, you know what it is better for them to address these issues now, and really get focused, if they can do that, we are ready to go. That helps our programs, it creates habitat and it solves their problem of water quality and making sure their farms still operate at a profitable level, with less chemical input, and they can be smarter about their operations and putting some of the structures and programs on the ground, that’s where we come in.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
None mentioned, more targeted. 

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
Oh yeah, if I’m with Congressman Lucas of Oklahoma, I’m gonna talk grass, he’s a cattle farmer, I need to know that. He does cattle so we talk grass and he was one of the big proponents of that bill. If I’m with Congressman Obi of Wisconsin, you know Obi’s a duck hunter, I know who he hunts with, my old employer, so you know what I’m going to talk to him about water fowl habitat, and I’m gong to talk to him about some of these programs where they are at in his district. If it’s Congressman Rehberg from Montana, I’m not going to talk to him at all, because he doesn’t give a damn about what we say, he’s all about commodity, even though a lot of our programs are popular in his state, he doesn’t care, at all. Congressman Pombo of California he cares somewhat because waterfowl is a big thing in his district, on the other hand he doesn’t like our programs at all, and that’s just the way he is. He is a higher ranking chairman on the committee and therefore he doesn’t care what we say. So you just have to know your battles. If it’s Harold Ford Jr. of Memphis you say “our offices are in your district, you’re the congressman for a lot of our staff, you need to vote this way” and he didn’t he voted the other way during the Kind vote. And we reminded him of that, he owes us and he knows it. And we didn’t that very lightly at all, that was the wrong vote. I know who got to him and I know how much money it cost but that was just a bad decision on his part. He needs to remember that we’re in his district so therefore you take care of us, that is just pure politics right there. And we are talking 150 jobs, putting on a number of events and putting money into his district. So he needs to be a little smarter about that. We’ll see, he’s a nice guy but it thought that was a bad decision and we informed his chief of staff that he made a mistake, and they told us that they owe us. He also didn’t show up to an event not long ago at our headquarters and there were 70,000 people there, and he failed to show and we had him on the agenda, so we took that as somewhat insulting. 

Nature of the Opposition
It got to the point where, this title has this much money and this title has this much money, now what are we going to do with it. And we would still try to get other money but if you get other money, you’re basically having to tag your friends. You have to go get commodity dollars, you don’t want to deal with that. Then you have to go after food stamps and nutrition. We were all lobbying a little on those things too we do research, we don’t do nutrition or food stamps, but that’s just not where you go but we still need money for some of our programs. 

Everyone is really out for themselves in the farm bill, so everyone is your opposition. On the other hand everyone’s your friend. If you’re a group like us everybody can be on your side, you just have to play really careful. For a while everybody was against us and then for a while we had commodities with us and everybody else with us. Opposition is the wrong word, everybody was against each other. Everyone is everyone else’s opposition on the farm bill. Like corn was the opposition for soybean because they wanted more dollars, and wheat was against cotton, and rice was against soybeans, and it was just this evil circle that went around and around and around, they were all fighting over every dime. And we didn’t have any outside talent, no outside lobbyists or anything like that, those guys: oh my god, there was a lot of them, there were people and I was like “when did you start working ag?” “oh we have a contract with blankety blankety blank” “oh okay good luck.” And that’s the way the title went.  

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
Not applicable, every player had their own argument. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
Not applicable. 

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
Not applicable. 

Described as a Partisan Issue
Yes. 
“It really had to do with the fact that it was unbelievably political. I don’t know if the bill would have passed if it had gone the other way, if it had gone more political, you had to fight tooth and nail for every dime you got”

Venue(s) of Activity
House and Senate Agriculture Committees

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
No pending action, the bill was signed into law.

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
Working to increase funding in the conservation title for conservation and preservation programs.

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I’ve been here about 15 months, before here I worked for Conservation Districts, I ran their shop and before then, I was at ICF Kaiser, doing some of their government affairs on energy issues and before that I was working for a private consulting company lobbying on ethanol and alternative fuel issues. I went to Bowling Green and had a job waiting for me because of an internship I had, so I was a grunt for a long time doing that and then came out here. And I enjoy what I do. 

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
All in-house, since we have the scientists in-house and the research in-house, we can go that way. A lot of it is conducted with various universities across the country, so we are using those studies to justify why we want more dollars; various duck numbers up and down, how the species are going, goose, dicky birds, just how they are doing and how the habitat effects them. We get that from in-house and through some of our partner organizations. We didn’t use think tanks or talking groups, that’s just not our deal. We know what we’ve got in terms of membership. We have a conservation committee within our board, we gave them come concepts of what we should be focusing on, they voted on it. This is the route we are going to go which we did. The farm bill is so structured and so focused it’s hard to say exactly what you’re going to do. It has to be more flexible. When we started having trouble after the Kind vote with loosing some members, we had a number of conference calls with our board members, did some back tracking but everyone was pretty happy because the numbers we ended up with in the end were pretty phenomenal. Some of them are higher then we actually expected in the end, so we were happy with that. 

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Three.

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
There are three of us, well sort of two, one retired he’s only in about once a month.

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individuals

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous
We’re stuck because some of our board members are rice farmers and cotton farmers down in the south. We were in a very tricky position, like I said we lost members. There are articles in newspapers, in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama and Tennessee where we are just trashed, people literally writing into the paper say “you should drop your membership to this organization right away” and we did, we lost members. Not a lot we had a tough year for other reasons. 9/11 happened. Our numbers were already down a bit from that, they went down because we lost some of our fundraising time and people just weren’t putting their dollars there, and that’s understandable. We lost half a committee in the World Trade Center because they were all at Canter Fitzgerald. These were people that the very next week had a DU fund raising dinner. They still put it on, and it was the greatest dinner they ever had and there were people crying all over the place, but they raised more money at that event, but they obviously sent it somewhere else. But the idea was they were going to go forward with it, these guys had worked hard on it. We lost about a six to eight.