A new bill proposing restrictions on lucrative and controversial government-backed farm promotion programs is expected to be introduced by Utah Republican senator Mike Lee and New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker on Thursday.

The move would affect the American Egg Board, the body revealed by the Guardian last year to have used its funds to wage a massive and secret campaign against Hampton Creek, a startup selling egg-free mayonnaise.

The law would broadly reform US Department of Agriculture marketing boards that allow small groups of executives, usually representatives from the largest agricultural producers, to spend funds collected from their smaller competitors, ostensibly to promote American farming.

Boards supporting sectors of the agricultural industry from eggs to beef to avocados are cited in the new bill.

Agricultural marketing programs, or “checkoff” programs, collect levies on commodities made in the US and use the funds to promote those commodities. But the restrictions on those funds are not always obeyed by the boards themselves, say the senators.

The bill would make the budgets of checkoff programs public. It would also require the programs to disclose any use of outside contractors, such as publicity firms or advertising agencies.

Lee, a conservative who champions limited government and often criticizes federal programs for “waste, fraud and abuse”, is rarely seen agreeing with the more liberal Booker, but here the issue unites environmentalists and capitalists.

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In an interview with the Guardian in October, Lee said he was “always on the alert” for “anti-competitive behavior, whether it’s a big government advantage or a big business advantage, and here it’s a hybrid of the two”.

Lee hinted at the new legislation at the time. “I think Congress has not only the right but the obligation to review laws even passed many decades ago to evaluate how federal authority is being used,” he said. The laws creating checkoff programs were passed in the 1930s.

“It’s a pretty good sign that two senators who don’t really agree on every issue are coming together,” said Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek, who has championed agriculture reform. “There’s no reason why the government should be so involved in this, from Lee’s perspective, and from Booker’s perspective, food policy should allow people to eat better and not worse.”

The senators say checkoffs’ apparent disregard of established law merited the closer scrutiny: “Although the laws establishing checkoff programs broadly prohibit the use of funds in any manner for the purpose of influencing legislation or government action, checkoff programs have been shown to use funds to influence policy directly or by partnering with organizations that lobby,” write the senators in the discussion draft of the bill.



In the case of the egg board, Joanne Ivy, who stepped down as CEO of the body late last year, advised Unilever on an ongoing lawsuit against Hampton Creek. Under Ivy, the board retained PR firm Edelman to disseminate pro-industrial farming talking points via food blogs and agreed to try – ultimately without success – to have Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo product pulled from Whole Foods, according to emails acquired by Freedom of Information Act (Foia) expert Ryan Shapiro and lawyer Jeffrey Light and passed to the Guardian.

In May, several food industry lobbying groups asked Congress to include language in an appropriations bill shielding checkoffs from future Foia requests.

In June, a letter to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) from Lee, Booker and Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, also a Democrat, said checkoffs had engaged in “behavior that we believe deserves further scrutiny”, citing “Foia requests regarding activity by federal farm promotion programs”.

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Those groups are also not representative of all American farmers, especially not farmers without transnational interests. Checkoffs have been sued by producers as recently as two months ago: also in May, a consortium of independent cattle ranchers filed suit against the USDA demanding exemption from their program.

“We are being taxed to promote a message that beef raised without the strict standards used by our members is the same as all other beef, a message we do not support and do not agree with,” the beef farmers wrote. The beef checkoff’s funds, which come from a $1-per-head levy on American cattle, were used to fund a Wendy’s ad campaign.

The farmers said they had been forced by the US government to promote foreign competitors; Wendy’s only specifies that its American restaurants use “North American beef”, meaning products could be imported from Canada or Mexico.

“In addition, checkoff funds have been used to advance the agenda of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association which promotes the idea that ‘beef is beef, whether the cattle were born in Montana, Manitoba or Mazatlán,’” said Bill Bullard, CEO of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-Calf), in a statement sent to the Guardian at the time of the suit.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association was among the signatories requesting the Foia exemption that same month.