The Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a spending bill covering the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department by a 16-14 party-line vote.
Republicans said the $30.01 billion bill restricted regulatory overreach by the EPA and Interior. But Democrats decried it as a partisan attempt to undercut environmental and climate safeguards.
“These riders make it impossible for this bill to become law,” Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., the top Democrat on the Appropriations Interior and Environment Subcommittee, said during the markup.
But GOP lawmakers said they had no alternative but to load up the bill with policy provisions because Democrats have threatened to block all spending bills over opposition to sequestration-level caps Republicans are following. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., chastised the minority party, saying that Democrats were “making the Senate look bad.”
Republicans, led by McConnell, have vowed to handcuff President Obama’s climate agenda, which includes as its centerpiece a proposed regulation to limit carbon emissions from power plants. Republican leadership has long said the must-pass spending bills present some of the best chances to do so.
“Of all the overreach, none has been more dramatic than the EPA,” said McConnell, who has encouraged governors not to submit plans for complying with the regulation because he believes the EPA lacks the authority to enforce the full suite of the proposed regulation.
The bill, which matches the $30.17 billion House version in tenor, will likely earn Obama’s veto if it comes to a vote on the floor because it takes a direct shot at climate policies that the president has come to view as his legacy. But Democratic resistance to the spending bills have Republicans gearing up for a massive omnibus spending negotiation or a continuing resolution that would extend current funding levels.
Perhaps more than specific funding levels, however, the battle was waged over measures trying to block Obama administration regulations.
Democrats said 11 such measures made the bill a nonstarter. They emphasized that provisions blocking the power plant rules, a lower ozone standard, the Waters of the U.S. rule, regulations for managing hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) on federal land and another measure preventing Interior from listing the greater sage grouse as endangered were some of the most problematic.
Republicans said the spending bill would prevent duplicative and far-reaching regulations that they said have slowed the economy.
“The view by many … is that the EPA is trying to force its arguably unlawful greenhouse gas regulations on the states,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairwoman of the Interior and Environment subcommittee, said at the hearing.
The bill would cut EPA funding by $539 million from current levels, amounting to $7.6 billion — $1 billion less than Obama requested. It cuts the agency’s legal budget, which it would need to defend and implement its power plant regulation along with potentially tighter standards on ground-level ozone, or smog, and a rule that expands jurisdiction over waterways that conservatives and some rural Democrats oppose.
Interior would get $11.05 billion. The bill also provides $3.61 billion for fighting wildfires, hitting the 10-year average for such funding.
