Senate Republicans are aiming to roll back funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s more controversial regulations while reducing overall spending by the agency, according to an appropriations bill released Tuesday.
“On the regulatory side of the EPA budget, this bill makes cuts in areas where the EPA has clearly overstepped its bounds,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairwoman of a Senate appropriations panel on the environment. Her panel introduced a $32 billion spending bill for EPA’s and Interior Department’s fiscal 2017 budgets.
Murkowski said the bill drew a line between EPA programs the GOP can support, such as providing clean drinking water to people, and those they can do without such as climate rules and other overreaching regulations that have been met with opposition in the courts. In some cases, federal judges have halted the rules’ implementation to weigh the merits of legal arguments against them.
“Several program areas that have issued controversial rules that are currently blocked in court are reduced because I believe it is more important to provide resources to programs that yield tangible results in improving the environment instead of funding more lawyers and bureaucrats to draft rules of questionable legality and dubious environmental benefit,” Murkowski said in prepared remarks.
The spending bill provides EPA and Interior Department programs with $32 billion, $1 billion shy of what President Obama requested in his budget. The bill is also less than the House version of the bill.
Murkowski said the bill takes “a common-sense approach to the EPA’s budget” by focusing resources on programs that take concrete steps to improve the quality of the environment for the public.
“We fully met the request for an additional $157 million for [drinking water], which builds critical infrastructure for clean drinking water in communities across the country,” she said. “Instead of following the president’s suggestion to cut [clean water programs] by more than $400 million, we maintained a robust level of $1.35 billion.”
The EPA now has a “powerful suite of tools to improve the quality of life for people around the country,” Murkowski added.
On the policy front, the bill blocks implementation of the controversial Waters of the United States rule, which the GOP fiercely opposes. The rule designates ditches and gullies as waterways, placing private lands under federal enforcement authority.
