HR-4205-119
Referred to the House Committee on Agriculture.
Sponsored by Claudia Tenney (R-NY)
What it does
This bill would require the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), a USDA agency, to conduct a survey of grape production in every state within one year of enactment and publish the results on its public website. In each of the four years following that initial survey, NASS would be required to publish updated production data specifically for the five states with the highest grape production from the prior year.
Who benefits
Grape growers and vineyard operators who would gain access to standardized, publicly available production benchmarks. Wine producers, juice manufacturers, and other grape-product industries that rely on supply data for purchasing and planning decisions. Agricultural researchers and economists studying the grape and wine sector. Commodity traders and investors in agricultural markets. State agricultural agencies and extension services that use federal data to advise growers. Small and mid-sized vineyards that currently lack resources to independently gather industry-wide data.
Who is hurt
Growers in states outside the top five producers who would receive less ongoing data coverage after the initial survey year. Competing data providers — private agricultural data firms — that may lose market share if free federal data substitutes for their paid services. NASS, which would bear the administrative and budgetary cost of conducting the survey and maintaining the data publication requirement. Taxpayers who fund NASS operations would indirectly bear those costs.
Supporters argue
Supporters argue that the USDA discontinued its dedicated grape production survey in 2014, leaving growers and industry participants without reliable, standardized federal data for over a decade. They contend that publicly available production statistics are essential for growers to make informed planting, harvesting, and marketing decisions, and that the absence of this data puts U.S. grape producers at a competitive disadvantage compared to industries with robust federal reporting.
Opponents argue
Opponents argue that the bill creates a tiered data system that, after the first year, covers only the top five producing states — leaving growers in smaller grape-producing states with no ongoing federal data support. They contend that directing limited NASS resources toward a single commodity's data publication may crowd out surveys for other agricultural sectors, and that private data markets have already filled the gap left by the 2014 discontinuation without federal intervention.
Constitutional context
No significant constitutional issue is presented. Congress has broad authority to direct federal agencies to collect and publish agricultural data under the Commerce Clause (Art. I, §8, cl. 3) and the Necessary and Proper Clause (Art. I, §8, cl. 18). This bill does not raise major questions doctrine concerns, as it is a narrow, specific congressional directive rather than a broad delegation of agency authority.
Checks and balances
Congress gains a narrow directive role by mandating a specific NASS survey and publication schedule; NASS retains discretion over survey methodology, and Congress exercises oversight through the House and Senate Agriculture Committees.
Historical precedent
USDA's NASS previously conducted annual grape production surveys until discontinuing them in 2014, establishing a direct federal precedent for this type of commodity-specific data collection.