Congress will explore the possibility of continuing funding federal programs next fiscal year at fiscal 2008 levels or put off enacting 2009 funding bills until a new president takes office in order to prevent White House proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, members of a Senate funding panel said yesterday.
"I'd like to talk with my colleagues [but] we will certainly consider" extending 2008 funding levels through the next fiscal year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Appropriations environment subcommittee, said after a hearing on President Bush's fiscal 2009 EPA funding request.
Feinstein said that, in addition to enacting a so-called continuing resolution to cover all of fiscal 2009, Congress plans to look into waiting until January when the next president takes office before enacting any 2009 spending bills.
"This [EPA] budget makes that the most viable course," Feinstein said, indicating that Congress would want improve on funding increases provided in fiscal 2008.
Bush proposed providing $7.14 billion for the EPA in fiscal 2009, a $329 million cut from the amount Congress provided in 2008. The largest proposed funding decrease would come from the clean water state revolving loan fund, which would get $555 million under the Bush proposal, $145 million less than the 2008 amount.
The clean water SRFs provide low-interest loans to local governments and operators of wastewater facilities to pay for improvements to and maintenance of infrastructure. The clean water SRFs have become a primary source of water infrastructure financing and about 27 states have leveraged their programs by issuing tax-exempt bonds.
One reason that Feinstein and other lawmakers are exploring these appropriations alternatives is that Bush, in his January State of the Union address, said he would veto any spending bill that does not cut the number and cost of "earmarks" in half. Lawmakers use earmarks to set aside appropriations funds for specific projects. Critics point out that his objections to earmarks only emerged after Democrats in 2006 won a majority in the House and Senate.
"This is a terrible budget and what [the administration] is saying is that, 'There is nothing you could do to approve it, take it or leave it, because we are not going to adhere to anything you put in the budget,'" Feinstein said.
Her comments were echoed by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who said during the hearing that it is "bureaucratic arrogance" to cut the budget and at the same time expect a cut in earmarks, which in many cases are used to boost funding for important programs.
"It puts us in an absolutely untenable position as to maintaining the level of ongoing programs that we have funded" through earmarks in the past, Stevens said. "The programs that affect my state would be better off under the 2008 [enacted budget] than the 2009 [funding proposal]."
EPA administrator Stephen Johnson, who appeared before the panel, defended the proposed cut to the clean water SRFs, noting that they are just one tool among others that the EPA will use to meet the nation's clean water needs.
"We do have a challenge and it is going to take all those pieces to make the progress that we all want to make," Johnson said.
Other strategies include water conservation initiatives and an administration proposal that Congress change the tax law and exclude from state volume caps tax-exempt private-activity bonds issued to finance wastewater and drinking projects.
Overall, "we believe that this budget is a good a budget that balances the needs for moving forward with environmental protection while at the same time recognizes that we have to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars," Johnson said.
