The White House aims to move and consolidate major environmental and energy programs under a federal reorganization plan it released Thursday.
The plan would move most of the Army Corps of Engineers’ work to the departments of Interior and Transportation, while leaving its defense-related functions in the Department of Defense.
It would shift the Corps’ commercial navigation functions such as ports to the Transportation Department. All other activities would move to Interior, including flood and storm damage response, aquatic ecosystem restoration, and operating hydropower dams. The White House says giving Interior more responsibility would keep most major water management programs in one agency.
“Everybody, Democrats, Republicans, local governments, state government, you, me, from the private sector, have
horror stories about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said as he presented the plan to President Trump.
“They perform some absolutely critical functions, Mr. President, no doubt about it. But over the course of the last century, their role has continued to creep and creep and creep … and we can do better.”
The White House says permitting infrastructure processes can be done smoother without multiple agencies having to issue permits and approvals. Democrats and environmentalists have opposed previous Trump administration efforts to change permitting, arguing the real intent is to undermine environmental and endangered species laws.
In a second proposal, the White House looks to merge the National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the Commerce Department, with Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service so that the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act can be administered in one agency.
Currently, when reviewing the impact of a proposed dam system, for example, Interior must evaluate the impact on endangered species, while Commerce analyzes the effects on marine animals. Sometimes, those the two agencies produce different results.
The Trump administration also proposes combining various environmental and hazardous waste cleanup programs. It would give more responsibility to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program by also having the department administer Interior’s Central Hazardous Materials program and a similar program governed by the Department of Agriculture.
EPA’s Superfund program is tasked with cleaning the nation’s most contaminated sites. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt emphasized his agency’s goal to clean up Superfund sites faster as a component of his “back to basics” agenda.
But the White House says cleanups of abandoned mines can be “challenging” because they exist on both federal and private lands. Superfund sites are on private land, and the EPA is also responsible for managing abandoned mine sites on private land. Interior and the Agriculture Department handle cleanups of mines on federal land.
Combining the functions would reduce “the number of decisions and approvals, and ultimately expediting the cleanup of sites,” the White House plan says.
The White House wants more consolidation in the Energy Department, too.
It calls for combining research and development programs for different energy sources — fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewables — into a single new Office of Energy Innovation.
The administration says the combined structure would break silos and enable energy technologies to compete against one another.
“Organizing applied energy research under one unified office has the potential to reduce a practice of picking energy technology winners and losers and pitting fuel types against one another for government funding and attention,” the restructuring plan says.
The proposal would integrate “some positive elements” of the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program into the new Office of Energy Innovation.
Previously, the White House proposed eliminating ARPA-E, but Congress has rejected those efforts. ARPA-E is a program with bipartisan support that funds innovations in energy technology, such as battery storage.
And finally, the White House reorganization plan would resurrect an unpopular idea to sell off the assets of many of the nation’s federally owned electric utilities from Tennessee to the Pacific Northwest.
Last month, a group of Republican lawmakers announced they had reached a deal with the Trump administration to kill the proposal, which was included in the president’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal.
Credit rating agency Moody’s concluded in an analysis this year that the proposal would harm the financial health of the federal utilities and their customers. The federal utilities, called “power marketing administrations,” include Bonneville Power, Southeastern Power Administration, Southwestern Power Administration, and the Western Area Power Administration.
