Larding up spending bills with controversial anti-environmental riders while slashing funds to enforce environmental safeguards is a habit that House and Senate Republicans can’t seem to break. For those who have better things to do than follow the Congressional appropriations process, let’s provide some context.
Each year, the House and Senate Appropriations committees write and pass spending bills. These bills determine how critical government agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Interior (DOI), and the Department of Energy (DOE), can spend their money. In addition to authorizing funding, they provide insight into what Congress considers critical priorities.
This year, in what is starting to feel routine, Republicans in both the House and Senate dramatically cut the budgets for environmental programs in defiance of all logic. The very people who were quick to blame EPA for the crisis in Flint, Michigan, cut the budgets of programs that often are our last lines of defense in preventing these types of crises.
You can’t make this stuff up.
It is truly unconscionable that Congressional Republicans are actively working to attack clean air, clean water, and wild places through these bills. For example, one of the House spending bills would prevent the EPA from implementing the Clean Water Rule and would allow pollution to damage streams and wetlands by prohibiting adequate environmental review. Another policy rider in this bill will delay the implementation of standards to reduce air pollution from offshore drilling sources.
These poison pill policy riders, coupled with insufficient budgets like their proposed one for EPA--which is already 20 percent below 2010 spending levels--will hurt communities across America.
Enough is enough already. Congressional Republicans need to stop playing politics with the health of our families and pass a clean budget. A budget without ideologically driven policy riders. A budget that fully funds the agencies we all rely on for clean air and clean water. A budget that’s both bipartisan and that will win the support of the American people and the President.
FIND OUT MORE:
For a comprehensive list of environmental riders in the Fiscal Year 2017 spending bills, check out this list created by our colleagues at the Natural Resources Defense Council.