The $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that needs to pass this week to avert a government shutdown increases spending on clean energy and keeps the Environmental Protection Agency funded at current levels.
That’s despite the White House suggestion that Congress cut EPA’s budget by one-third and make drastic reductions in clean energy research.
Tarak Shah, a former chief of staff in the science and energy office at the US Department of Energy, told Vox the bill was an “utter repudiation of the Trump budget!”
The EPA will keep its $8.1 billion budget with a few changes, including $66 million allocated toward the Superfund program for cleaning up highly contaminated sites.
The Department of Energy’s high-risk, high-reward research incubator, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, can also breathe easy. Trump’s budget proposal recommended eliminating the popular program, but Congress gave it a $47 million boost up to $353 million.
The DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office, which the White House wanted to gut by $1.3 billion, also got a 15 percent increase to a new total of $2.3 billion.
There are also a few strange energy-related riders: The bill declares biomass as a carbon-neutral energy source, though scientists are still debating whether that’s the case. Livestock producers are permanently exempted from the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations, killing any efforts to keep them in check.
On balance, the spending bill (if it passes) signals that while the Trump administration is desperate to save American coal and eliminate environmental regulations, lawmakers from both parties still think that protecting the environment is a high priority and that clean energy is a worthwhile endeavor.
Federal agencies, however, have some discretion in how they spend the money Congress gives them, and some departments are dragging their feet when it comes to doing the work they’re supposed to do.
We’re already seeing grant applications and research programs being screened for references to climate change at the EPA, the DOE, and the Department of the Interior. The EPA has seen a decline in enforcement of rules against polluters, and lawmakers have complained that programs like ARPA-E have delayed or not issued the funding that they’re required to provide.
So while many energy and environmental initiatives across government received more cash, there is still an ongoing fight to make sure the money actually gets spent.
CopandShop on March 23rd, 2018 at 01:31 UTC »
The omnibus also is over 2,000 pages with a lot of poor and harmful budget plans to the U.S. economy. Look at what Rand Paul has been tweeting. You should never support a bill that
You are unable to completely read before the vote. That has a lot of ideas that could actually harm the U.S. but push that aside because you like one thing on it.P.S. look up the cloud mining part of the bill. If you’re too lazy to, it basically says all the information gathered on U.S. citizens by social media apps and organizations are to be shared and accessible to other foreign countries. Like come on whatever happened to the Americans that cared about their privacy.
Edit* thanks everyone for the upvotes never had this many in my life a wee tad overwhelmed
Devanismyname on March 23rd, 2018 at 00:33 UTC »
Great, so our methane machines are gonna be pumping overtime.
KOSisKurama on March 22nd, 2018 at 23:25 UTC »
This is how the fuckers get themselves re elected. “Look he went against the president on the greedy goobler bill” nvrmind the bill had a rider paying congressman’s cousin 7 billion for a snow cone maker....
Fuck all those fuckers.