09-09-2000

CONGRESS: Riding a Wave of Discontent

In what has become an annual game of legislative cat and mouse,
congressional Republicans, frustrated at not being able to enact their
conservative agenda in the environmental arena, are once again loading
budget bills with dozens of riders aimed at undercutting Clinton
Administration initiatives.


The Republican maneuver has sent Administration officials and
environmental lobbyists scurrying to track down and strip the riders from
the 11 fiscal 2001 appropriations bills now pending in Congress. Green
groups are lobbying to remove 54 amendments they describe as
anti-environmental; some of those provisions have also drawn White House
threats to veto the overall bills. "The riders are among the highest
priorities for the national environmental groups," said Mary Beth
Beetham, the Defenders of Wildlife director of legislative
affairs.


Among other things, the current generation of Republican riders would
block the Administration from completing work on tough new environmental
controls on the mining, ranching, and timber industries. Other riders
would stop federal regulators from cracking down on water and air
pollution and on public exposure to pesticides. In some cases, the
Republicans have designed their amendments to delay Administration
programs until next year, anticipating that if George W. Bush wins the
White House, his appointees will eliminate or transform Democratic
environmental policies.


The federal budget has been a major vehicle for environmental action since
1995, when the Republicans took control of Congress. New Republican
committee leaders quickly locked horns with the Democratic Administration,
and the stalemate produced few new environmental laws. So the Republicans
turned to the "must-pass" spending bills in an effort to
modify-and in some cases gut-the White House's more ambitious
environmental programs.


Administration officials and environmental advocates complain that
congressional Republicans are using the obscure and arcane appropriations
process to rewrite federal environmental law because they want to avoid
the extensive public scrutiny that a full-blown legislative initiative
would attract. "We're concerned that very significant issues are
being decided by riders and not on their merits," said Gary Guzy, the
Environmental Protection Agency's general counsel. "This can have a
profound impact on the health and the environment of the
nation."


Opponents have already succeeded in stripping some riders from
appropriations bills this year. In late July, Sen. Pete V. Domenici,
R-N.M., agreed to drop an amendment that would have barred the Interior
Department from taking action to protect two endangered species of minnow
that live in a stretch of the Rio Grande. Domenici's rider would have
prevented Interior from releasing water into the river from a local dam
during the summer drought. He dropped the rider after several conservation
groups, which had filed suit to protect the fish, reached an agreement on
river management with local irrigators and state and local government
officials.


Republicans have also dropped their efforts to block the National Forest
Service from preserving national forest lands on which no roads have been
built. And the conservatives abandoned a rider that would have blocked
funding for four new national monuments that President Clinton has
designated. Western Republican lawmakers strongly supported both
riders.


As budget negotiations between Congress and the Administration heat up
this fall, some of the remaining GOP riders will end up on the cutting
room floor. But opponents worry that just as many new riders-and some of
the old ones-may be slipped into the remaining spending bills as they make
their way through the House and Senate. "We have to watch all of the
appropriations bills like a hawk," said Debbie Sease, the Sierra
Club's legislative director. "Until they go to the President's desk,
we can't assume they're safe."


This year's battle over the environmental riders first erupted in June,
when Republican lawmakers tried to prevent the EPA from finalizing an
ambitious new water pollution control program that requires the states to
determine how much pollution is flowing into local lakes and streams and
to set daily limits on the amount of pollution flow. After business
leaders protested the program, the Republicans-during a late-night
conference committee session-attached a rider to an $11.2 billion
emergency-spending bill that barred the EPA from spending any money to
complete the water pollution regulations.


In response, the EPA circumvented Congress's action by releasing those
regulations before the spending bill was signed into law. Outraged by the
Administration's end run, congressional Republicans are now threatening to
pass another rider that would block regulators from implementing the new
water pollution rules.


The EPA's air pollution program has also come under attack in a spending
bill. In mid-June, two GOP lawmakers won House approval of a provision
that would prevent federal regulators from identifying the communities
that don't meet the federal air pollution limits that govern ozone, more
commonly known as smog.


The federal air pollution standard, issued by EPA in 1997, has been the
subject of a contentious legal battle. Last year, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the EPA
overstepped its legal authority in issuing the pollution limits. However,
the district court gave the agency the go-ahead to begin measuring
pollution levels across the nation and to identify regions that don't meet
the standards. The case goes to the Supreme Court this fall.


Congressional Republicans argue that the EPA should stop work on the air
pollution standard until the high court rules sometime next year. In a
"Dear Colleague" letter in June to other members of Congress,
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, argued that regions that violate
the EPA's pollution limits "could be faced with an almost immediate
stifling of new investment."


But environmental groups charge that Congress is blocking the EPA's
actions in order to prevent the public from learning more about local air
pollution problems. "This rider is a devastating blow to the public's
right to know how polluted their air is," said Jim Haefele, the U.S.
Public Interest Research Group's clean air advocate. "This is
see-no-evil, hear-no-evil environmental policy."


Haefele argued that campaign contributions from major industrial polluters
have persuaded lawmakers to oppose the EPA's air pollution regulations. A
draft study by U.S. PIRG charges that members of Congress who voted for
the air pollution rider received almost three times as much money in
campaign contributions from electric companies, automakers, and other
polluting industries as the lawmakers who voted against the
measure.


Some of this year's riders are perennial favorites. Since 1995, for
example, Western Republicans have used a variety of imaginative budget
amendments to stop the Interior Department from imposing tough new
environmental controls on the hard-rock mining industry. The industry is
operating under regulations written in 1981, a year before mining
companies began their recent practice of using cyanide to extract gold
from massive amounts of earth that was dug from open-pit mines.


The Interior Department is attempting to force these companies to post
environmental cleanup bonds before beginning mining and to be subject to
strict new water pollution regulations. But those controls would be
blocked under a rider added to the Agriculture appropriations bill by Sen.
Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Chairman Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska.


A host of new riders are also worrying White House officials, particularly
a proposal championed by Sen. Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., that would
prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from protecting several endangered
species on the Missouri River. At risk are two endangered bird species and
one fish species that depend on regular water flows in the South Dakota
stretch of the river. But Bond says an Army Corps plan to help the species
would have a negative economic impact on Missouri River
navigation.


Other appropriations riders opposed by the Administration and the
environmental community include:


* An amendment requiring the Bureau of Land Management to extend grazing
permits-without first assessing their environmental impact-for ranchers
whose permits expire or are transferred during the next fiscal
year.


* A rider preventing the EPA from requiring polluters to clean up the
contaminated sediments they have deposited on river bottoms. The provision
is specifically designed to stop regulators from forcing General Electric
Co. to clean up the toxic PCB sediments in New York's Hudson and
Housatonic rivers.


* A provision ordering the Forest Service to use money from other
programs, if necessary, to guarantee that the agency meets a congressional
mandate to sell 3.6 billion board feet of timber in the next fiscal year.
Environmental groups say this rider would make logging the dominant use of
the national forests.


* An amendment halting the EPA's plans to charge fees to pesticide
companies when regulators assess the safety of their chemicals. White
House officials say the provision is designed to dramatically slow down
the agency's review of thousands of commonly used pesticides.


* A rider barring the Forest Service from imposing road-building
restrictions on wilderness areas in New Hampshire's White Mountain
National Forest.


* An amendment preventing the EPA from issuing stricter limits on arsenic
levels in drinking water.


* A provision blocking the Forest Service from restricting mining in the
Mark Twain National Forest and other areas of the Missouri Ozarks.


Margaret Kriz

National Journal