Week ahead: Lawmakers turn focus to EPA spending

Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress will work in the coming week on contentious spending bills for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Interior Department.

The full Appropriations Committee in the House is planning to vote on its bill and consider amendments Wednesday.

The $32.1 billion legislation was unveiled in May, and the subcommittee that wrote it approved it shortly after.

{mosads}The bill takes aim squarely at President Obama’s environmental priorities. It would cut $64 million from last year’s levels and block funding for major regulations on power plant emissions, water pollution and coal mining.

The bill enjoys strong support among Republicans, who want to rein in Obama’s environmental regulations. Democrats are ardently opposed, and are likely to introduce numerous amendments at the committee meeting to try to undo some of the top GOP requests in the bill.

The EPA and Interior spending bill in the upper chamber, though, is playing out differently.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is due to unveil its proposed Interior and EPA bill and move it through both subcommittee and committee.

Last year’s bill tried to defund major environmental regulations. But each appropriations bill unveiled in the Senate so far this year has been bipartisan and free of policy riders, and the Interior and EPA bill is likely to follow suit.

The subcommittee with jurisdiction over the bill, headed by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), will consider it Tuesday, and the full committee is due to act Thursday.

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, the House Oversight Committee will meet Tuesday to examine allegations of misconduct and unethical behavior at the National Park Service (NPS).

On the agenda are numerous misconduct reports from the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General, including allegations surrounding conflicts of interest, sexual misconduct, improper contract steering and more.

NPS Director Jonathan Jarvis will testify, along with acting Inspector General Mary Kendall.

The House Natural Resources Committee has a full slate of items on its agenda for the week.

It will hold subcommittee hearings on a bill to establish an Interior Department stakeholder committee on royalty policy, hearings on a pair of bills regarding American Indian tribes and the Bureau of Land Management’s land planning regulations, as well as a full committee markup.

On the Senate side, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing Tuesday on pipeline infrastructure and the “economic, safety, environmental, permitting, construction and maintenance” considerations associated with them.

The next day, that panel’s subcommittee on national parks will meet to debate dozens of bills in its jurisdiction.

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