This is a story of Republican values, environmental edition.
On Friday, with the government shutdown deadline less than two weeks away, the House of Representatives got around to passing the 2024 Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Funding Bill by a 213-203. Every single vote for the bill, except one, were from Republicans. Only 3 Republicans opposed the bill. Of all the various appropriations bills (there are 12 of them), this is the bill which most directly impacts environmental policies in this country. And today’s MAGA-infested, sedition-supporting Republican party launched an all-out, sweeping assault on. many of those policies.
On some levels, of course, this shouldn’t be terribly surprising. For years, the Republican Party has enthusiastically supported and promoted a wide a variety of anti-environmental policies, led perhaps by its climate denialism and often couched in the framing of opposition to “heavy-handed, burdensome” regulations. Still, the scope and breadth of the cuts in yesterday’s bill are truly staggering and deeply,deeply offensive (and disturbing) if you care about environmental protection.
For example, this bill cuts funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — the federal agency tasked with working to ensure we have clean air, drinkable water, livable land, and leads our fight against climate change (among many other responsibilities.) — by a whopping 39%. That cut would reduce the funding level of the EPA to the lowest level since 1991. That’s just for starters.
Among many, many other odious provisions, the bill also:
- Slashes funding for our national parks;
- Hacks over $9 billion from programs contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest legislative investment in fighting climate change ever, including $7.8 billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund;
- cuts EPA’s Clean Air Program by at least $200 million;
- eliminates funds for environmental justice;
- whacks EPA’s infrastructure grant programs $1.8 billion;
- aggressively promotes fossil fuel extraction and development by opening our public lands for oil, gas, and mineral leasing;
You can get a a more comprehensive look at the sweeping nature of these extreme cuts here. This selection from a letter to congressional leaders signed by more than 60 environmental groups, ranging from the League of Conservation Voters to the National Parks Conservation Association captures the essence of this bill:
“Following a summer full of record heat waves, horrific flooding, and wildfire smoke blanketing much of the nation, this bill would gut the agencies charged with protecting our environment and our health and would massively undermine last year’s historic climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. It would also introduce an onslaught of extreme anti-environmental policy mandates that have no place in the appropriations process. This attack on our health, lands, wildlife, biodiversity, air, water, oceans, and communities is unacceptable and must be rejected.”
The good news, of course, is that this bill is going nowhere, as Joan McCarter and Walter Einenkel have previously noted. It brazenly reneges on the debt-ceiling deal with the Biden Administration that the House-led GOP signed off on a few short months ago. The Senate — which has been advancing overwhelmingly bipartisan appropriations bills in line with that debt ceiling deal --will never agree to these cuts.
Just the latest evidence that House Republicans are fundamentally unserious people who have no business being in power, responsible for actually governing.
But it is significant as a massive, idiotic, and stunningly unproductive waste of time. A waste of time which is particularly unhelpful coming on the heels of 3 weeks of government paralysis thanks to the GOP’s inept Speaker fiasco and with the deadline to avoid a government shutdown fast approaching on November 17. Oh, not to mention the fact that the world is on fire.
Additionally, it establishes a terribly low baseline when negotiations to reconcile the House and Senate versions of this Interior appropriations bill begin IF the Democratic-led Senate considers compromising with the radical House extremists,
And it is remarkably revealing in telling us what Republican “environmental” priorities will be under a new GOP Administration if Republicans hold the House and manage to take the Senate.
It sure as hell wouldn’t be pretty.