Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013 - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I want to discuss my amendment regarding the Environmental Protection Agency's release of farmers' information. By now, many of my colleagues have heard about the Environmental Protection Agency's release of individual personal information to environmental activists.

This should not have happened. The EPA released information on over 80,000 farmers nationwide, and over 9,000 Iowans. I can't even characterize some of these Iowans as livestock producers; many of them are simply hobby farmers. There is a person on the list who has 12 horses; another gentleman on the list has one pig.

It is downright absurd that EPA would collect this kind of information and then hand it over to environmental activists. Given what we have seen recently with the egregious actions by the Internal Revenue Service, we should all be outraged by the continuing pattern of overreach by this administration.

This whole situation just doesn't pass the commonsense test. We have seen acts of eco-terrorism in the past against farmers. Farmers shouldn't have to fear their personal information being released to groups who may want to use the information to harass or terrorize family farmers. This amendment would restrict EPA's ability to release such data.

Since EPA can't put an end to this reckless behavior, then Congress needs to step in and fix the problem for EPA. I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

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