Spending bill keeps environmental programs, fixes grain glitch, funds parks, strengthens gun background checks - Entrepreneur Generations

In what Dino Grandoni of The Washington Post calls a "swing and a miss" for the White House, the spending bill Congress tentatively agreed on this week mostly preserves the environmental and clean energy programs the Trump administration wants to cut. The bill also reportedly fixes the so-called grain glitch, which threatens to distort grain markets, clarifies that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is allowed to conduct gun violence research, strengthens background checks for gun purchases, and may greenlight almost $3 billion in funding to fight the opioid epidemic, Sylvan Lane reports for The Hill.

Democrats blocked riders that would have prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing Obama-era methane rules, rolled back the Waters of the United States rule that restricts farm runoff and other pollution from going into streams, and taken gray wolves in Wyoming and near the Great Lakes from the endangered species list, Grandoni reports.

The National Park Service will get a $150 million funding increase to help address its $11.6 billion maintenance backlog. The bill also boosts EPA appropriations for cleaning up Superfund sites by $66 million. Though overall funding for the EPA's regulatory programs was reduced $23.5 million, the bill fully funds the agency's state and regional grants. It also denied the administration the funding to execute a large-scale buyout of EPA staff, including scientists.

"Energy programs within the Energy Department will get a $1.6 billion boost to a total of $12.9 billion in funding. Congress will increase funding for the department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, an energy technology nursery that the department's head Rick Perry called 'impressive' and 'simply a preview of our possibilities' last week, by $47 million for a total of $353 million. For two years in a row, the White House had called for eliminating the agency," Grandoni reports. "Another part of the department targeted by Trump for heavy cuts, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, received $2.3 billion, or about a 14 percent increase in funding from current levels. The Trump administration wanted to cut funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs by nearly three-fourths."

Trump got a small win on the border wall: "The bill is expected to include $641 million for 33 miles of new border fencing, and $1.296 billion in funding new border technology such as levees and fences, not a concrete wall. Trump hoped to win $25 billion in money that could be put in a trust for the wall," Lane reports.

The bill was generally supported by moderate Republicans and Democrats, though Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said he thinks the bill is wasteful spending; and his colleague, Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said the bill was a "Great Dane-size whiz down the leg of every taxpayer in America."

The vote is expected today. If the bill is not approved Friday, the government will face another shut-down.

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2u71EIk Spending bill keeps environmental programs, fixes grain glitch, funds parks, strengthens gun background checks - Entrepreneur Generations

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