New Report: Challenges to Scaling RCPP
Edited by Harry Huntley, Senior Agriculture Policy Analyst
What kind of a raise are you hoping to get next year? How much more money do you want to be making 4 years from now? I wouldn’t mind getting paid 800% more, would you? But I would definitely have to make some adjustments if I wanted all that extra money to go to good use.
This is the situation for the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The increase in funding–from its $300 million/year baseline to a total of $2.7 billion in 2026–is proportionately the largest of any of the conservation programs that received a boost from the IRA. And while it undoubtedly has made significant improvements to natural resources across the country, the program has been marred by delays in contracting, uneven implementation of new program policies, and mismatched IT tools.
So, the agency in charge is making some changes to how the program spends its funding, much like you or I would if we got such a big raise. The Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) put together improvement teams to survey the partners who have received awards under this not-quite-a-grant program and identify these issues so they can begin to make improvements.
While the Farm Bill provides the ultimate statutory authority for the program and a new rulemaking comes out after each Farm Bill, each year’s notice of funding opportunity (NoFO) is the main opportunity for granular policymaking. This new report reviews RCPP’s 2023 NoFO through the lens of scaling the program to meet the IRA’s expanded budget for it. It provides essential background, highlights the most crucial changes, and offers some suggestions for future improvements.
NRCS has already done a lot to make the program more attractive and inclusive to applicants, and that resulted in an almost-record 163 applications. In the next NoFO, there are significant opportunities to improve the program’s clarity, speed, and flexibility. And EPIC plans to conduct more work with partners to develop exactly how to do that.
