Lawmakers clash over climate riders, cuts in spending bills
House lawmakers sparred over a trio of fiscal 2025 spending bills Monday, rekindling the kinds of partisan feuds on climate and energy riders that contributed to the chaotic fiscal 2024 appropriations process.
The arguments began Monday morning with the release of House Republicans’ fiscal 2025 bills for the State and Homeland Security departments.
It picked up again in the afternoon with a Rules Committee debate on the bill governing Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, which the full House will vote on Tuesday.
For the second year in a row, what historically are considered some of the least controversial of the 12 spending bills yielded Democratic eye rolls, snarky criticisms and promises to reject GOP proposals to defund federal climate initiatives.
While House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) highlighted the ways the State-Foreign Operations Subcommittee’s bill “prioritizes our national security and reduces wasteful spending,” Democratic appropriators called it “reckless” for its provisions that target climate spending.
“Republicans’ draconian [State-Foreign Operations] legislation isn’t surprising, but their indifference to our planet and all of us who live on it is still shocking,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chair emeritus of the House’s Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, said in a statement to E&E News.
“We will fight this deeply misguided proposal tooth and nail,” Connolly said.
The State-Foreign Operations bill, to be marked up in subcommittee Tuesday morning, is unlikely to become law as written given current Democratic control of the Senate and White House, but it serves as an important marker of GOP policy goals during an election year.
The spending measure comes in at $51.7 billion in total. That’s 11 percent below current enacted levels and 19 percent below President Joe Biden’s budget request.
It would prohibit the implementation of a number of Biden administration executive orders on climate impacts, carbon emissions, clean energy and the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Further, it would block spending for the 2015 Paris climate accord, the Green Climate Fund, the Clean Technology Fund and the Loss and Damages Fund.
House appropriators added these provisions to the bill’s base text this year after last year relying on amendments to try to include them.
“Yet again, the majority is attempting to load up a critically important bipartisan bill with poison pill riders and cuts that would devastate vulnerable populations, undermine the fight against climate change, reduce diversity, and jeopardize our international standing,” House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said in a statement.
Disaster funding
Democrats similarly rebuked the House’s fiscal 2025 Homeland Security bill for its border policies but stayed largely quiet on its funding for disaster relief and mitigation.
That’s because Republicans made the Homeland Security bill one of the few House spending bills with higher nondefense discretionary spending levels than in fiscal 2024, with some of those funding boosts supporting federal disaster recovery accounts.
The measure allocates $64.8 billion in total discretionary funding, including a 5 percent increase in nondefense funding and a 2 percent increase in defense funding.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency would get $28.4 billion, an increase of nearly 11 percent over the enacted level. FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which is projected to run out of money this summer, would receive $22.7 billion of that sum, about $2.4 billion above the enacted level.
Roughly $240 million would go toward the National Flood Insurance Fund, about the same as currently enacted.
Resilience funds to 'Never-Never Land'
The Rules Committee considered the Military Construction-VA bill Monday evening, blocking an amendment to slash the bill's anti-climate riders.
H.R. 8580 allocates $147.5 billion in discretionary funding — about $6.4 billion less than the enacted level — and already contains numerous provisions that take aim at the administration’s actions on climate change.
Like the State-Foreign Operations bill, it would block implementation of Biden’s executive orders on climate change and clean energy development.
The panel rejected 9-3 along party lines making in order for debate an amendment from Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Calif.) to strike those provisions from the text.
The White House marked its opposition to the Military Construction-VA bill Monday in a statement of administration policy.
The Office of Management and Budget praised the bill’s $23 billion in advance appropriations for the Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund — a product of the 2022 Honoring Our PACT Act — but blasted other GOP policy riders. Biden promised to veto the measure if it were to reach his desk.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), ranking member of the House Military Construction-VA Appropriations Subcommittee, went back and forth with Rules Committee member Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) on $30 million in climate resilience funds in last year’s bill that Republicans omitted from the fiscal 2025 bill.
“We are in a climate crisis, and Republicans are cutting dedicated funding for resiliency and including harmful policy riders,” she said. “Last year, we provided DOD with $30 million in dedicated funding for resiliency, a comparatively small sum of funding now, which will pay huge dividends in the future and ensure our national security in the face of our changing climate.”
Norman countered that that money was going “into Never-Never Land.”
The committee made in order for debate an amendment from Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) in support of accelerating remediation of military installation drinking water contaminated by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.