In the News

The rules will affect new residential construction projects funded by the federal Housing and Rural Development agency. Now, lawmakers are pushing the agency that oversees the nation’s two largest mortgage backers to adopt similar measures.

Growing electricity costs and the need to climate-proof homes as temperatures rise have prompted the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to adopt updated energy standards for new single and multi-family homes.

House Ag Committee Republicans are set to release their farm bill draft on Friday. While the wait continues for the legislation’s specifics, opponents are wasting little time pushing back against what they expect to be an unacceptable bill.

Federal regulators have overhauled the way managers of U.S. power grids will plan and pay for electricity expansions, giving states a bigger role and lifting efforts to add more wind and solar power.

In a 2-1 partisan split, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission required utilities and regional grid operators to plan for electricity growth and a changing mix of energy resources decades into the future. The decision is the most consequential policy initiative from FERC in more than a decade explicitly aimed at regional planning.

A landmark transmission plan released Monday that seeks to bolster renewable energy is deepening the partisan divide on Capitol Hill.

While Democrats applauded the long-anticipated Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rule to enhance the nation’s antiquated grid, Republicans were openly hostile toward it, arguing it would increase energy costs.

The reactions by lawmakers underscored the hurdles that bipartisan permitting and transmission legislation faces in Congress.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson prepares to release the text of his draft farm bill as he seeks to lure some Democratic votes for the legislation ahead of the panel’s May 23 debate. This Wednesday, three Democrats on the House Ag Committee will hold a news conference to call for keeping climate-related restrictions on the Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding when it’s brought into the farm bill.

Nine Democrats urged the Federal Housing Finance Agency on Thursday to require new homes with mortgages backed by government-sponsored enterprises to meet newly-finalized energy efficiency codes from the Housing and Urban Development and Agriculture Departments.

Some of Capitol Hill's most prominent environmental champions are calling for congressional leaders to pack the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill with provisions that would support energy efficiency and climate resilience.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress pushed polar opposites to the Biden administration for how to manage national forests: curtail logging in mature and old forests or quit trying to rein in the practice.

The competing messages came in letters from lawmakers to the Department of Agriculture, which is moving toward new protections for old-growth areas in the national forest system but leaving largely unanswered what to do with "mature" forests that could age into old growth in the decades ahead.