2024 budget: It’s past time for Congress to appropriately fund the EPA

The Biden administration’s proposed 2024 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) takes a significant step toward reversing years of declining resources and stagnant funding. EPA spending, in real dollars, fell by half between 1980 and the end of the Trump administration, and its workforce is smaller than it was in 1990. The agency still lacks the resources to do its job of protecting people and the environment, and its program to enforce environmental protection laws has been hobbled by years of cutbacks. Congress holds EPA’s purse strings and needs to give the agency the funding it needs to protect our health and the air, water and land on which we all depend.

The first EPA appropriations of the Biden term were largely based on a 2021 budget signed by President Trump, with minimal changes in the form of “increases” too small even to keep up with inflation.

The 2024 request seeks to rebuild EPA and restore its diminished capacity to carry out its core functions. It provides nearly $3 billion in new funding to bring the agency’s programs and workforce to the levels maintained for two decades between 1992 and 2012. It restores the capacity of EPA and states to carry out core environmental protection functions, with $1.4 billion in new funding for EPA science and environmental programs and another $260 million to support state environmental programs.

The proposed budget addresses climate change with a $750 billion boost to measures to reduce air pollution. This new funding will go to air, climate and energy research; EPA’s air and indoor air programs; support for state and tribal air quality management; as well as grants to reduce diesel emissions.

The budget invests nearly $1.8 billion across numerous programs to advance environmental justice. That includes the addition of $300million in support for the agency’s environmental justice program and to building the agency’s civil rights capacity and increasing the ability of Indigenous tribes to protect the environment in Indian Country. The increase will support the newly created National Program Manager for Environmental Justice, and it will foster agency efforts to reduce environmental burdens and increase environmental benefits to disadvantaged communities, as well as build collaborative partnerships with all stakeholders to build healthy, sustainable communities.

The new budget provides $760 million to strengthen compliance with the federal environmental laws and hold violators accountable with enhanced tools to facilitate better understanding and compliance. It includes a $120 million boost for more inspectors, and for civil and criminal enforcement and improved compliance monitoring. The new resources will enable the use of new technology for more effective and efficient compliance inspections. EPA will also integrate environmental justice and climate change considerations into all aspects of its enforcement and compliance assurance work, increase inspections affecting overburdened communities, and improve public access to compliance data to help affected communities better understand and manage risks.

The budget proposes more than $4 billion to upgrade drinking water and wastewater infrastructure nationwide, with a focus on underserved and rural communities, including Indian reservations, which have historically been overlooked and in some cases lack even safe sanitation or indoor plumbing. This complements the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was signed into law in 2021, which provides $8 billion for water infrastructure and lead service line replacement. That is just a down payment on the 20-year $740 billion investment that recent assessments say are needed to maintain, upgrade and replace critical drinking water and wastewater infrastructure.

The budget actually reduces funding for the Superfund hazardous waste cleanup program by $900 million. But that is more than offset by the new availability of $2.5 billion for a full range of cleanup activities through the recently reinstated Superfund tax and the infrastructure law provides another $700 million for Superfund cleanups. The budget also provides $30 million to clean up and redevelop former hazardous waste sites under the brownfields program, to supplement annual brownfields funding of $300 million under the infrastructure law.

This funding will advance the administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which directs 40 percent of the benefits of federal spending to disadvantaged communities, which cluster disproportionately near Superfund sites.

As noted, for more than a decade, EPA’s budgets have been built by using the previous years’ funding levels as a baseline. That has fostered incremental changes cut and pasted from past appropriations, with modest tweaks adding or reducing dollar amounts by a few percent without adequately addressing EPA’s current needs. That pattern may explain why EPA has been unable to obtain the critical funding needed to implement new responsibilities and meet new deadlines under 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Those new responsibilities essentially doubled EPA’s workload, but its budget barely increased and lack of resources has caused it to miss many of the deadlines established by the act.

Last year, Congress rejected 70 percent of the needed new funding, and EPA is currently requesting an increase of $48 million above last year’s level for TSCA. Without adequate funding, EPA will be forced to miss more deadlines and fall further behind in implementing the new law.

Once again, EPA is simply requesting the resources it needs to revitalize the agency and do its work to protect our nation’s people and environment. Congress should cease its nickel-and-dime approach to the EPA budget and give the agency the funding it needs to do its job.

David F. Coursen is a former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) attorney and a member of the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit organization of EPA alumni working to protect the agency’s progress toward clean air, water, land and climate protection.