House Proposal Would Pump More Funding to Army Corps
Workers open the gates of the Bonnet Carre spillway, a river diversion structure, which diverts water from the rising Mississippi River, left, to Lake Pontchartrain, in Norco, La., Thursday, March 8, 2018. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
The House Appropriations Committee included the spending increase in fiscal 2019 legislation for water and energy programs.
Funding for harbor and flood control projects and other activities overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would be increased by about 6 percent under a bill House lawmakers released Sunday.
The House Appropriations Committee unveiled fiscal year 2019 spending legislation that covers the Army Corps, a variety of energy programs, and the Bureau of Reclamation, which is responsible for dams and other water infrastructure across the western U.S.
Overall the draft appropriations bill proposes $44.7 billion of spending, up $1.5 billion from the current 2018 fiscal year.
Of that sum, $7.28 billion would go to the Army Corps, an increase of $451 million, over fiscal 2018.
Funding for Bureau of Reclamation and Department of the Interior water projects checks in at $1.56 billion, up $75 million.
A subcommittee markup hearing for the bill is scheduled for Monday evening.
The Army Corps owns more than 600 dams, operates upwards of 12,000 miles of inland navigation channels, and oversees a range of environmental restoration projects, among other responsibilities.
It has faced a perennial shortage of funding for projects in recent years. The agency now has a roughly $96 billion construction backlog, according to estimates cited by lawmakers and Corps officials during a Senate committee hearing early this year.
Beyond setting spending levels, the House bill contains a provision that would repeal the so-called Waters of the United States rule, an Obama-era measure intended to limit pollution in streams and wetlands.
The 2015 rule stirred strong opposition among the agriculture, oil and gas, and manufacturing sectors, and its implementation was hamstrung by legal challenges.
President Trump last year ordered the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps to review and rescind or rewrite the rule. EPA and the Corps currently use regulatory guidelines that preceded the rule and are in the process of considering how it might be revised, according to EPA.
Other spending proposed in the bill would go to environmental cleanup projects, including those at sites contaminated by nuclear weapons production, such as the Hanford site in Washington state and the Oak Ridge site in east Tennessee.
The bill calls for $6.9 billion in cleanup spending, $257 million less than fiscal 2018.
Fiscal year 2019 begins Oct. 1. But in recent years lawmakers have struggled to pass year-long spending legislation on time and have relied on stopgap measures to keep the government funded.
Trump signed an "omnibus" spending package for the current fiscal 2018 budget cycle in March. The legislation was crafted under a two-year budget framework that relaxed spending caps.
The two-year deal also covers fiscal 2019. But Trump voiced disapproval of the March legislation, saying he would never sign a bill like it again. Since then, the White House has been looking at ways to claw back previously approved funding.
Bill Lucia is a Senior Reporter for Government Executive's Route Fifty and is based in Washington, D.C.
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