Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to a reckless and unconscionable Interior appropriations bill put forward by the House Republican majority. Once again, they have put a radical, out-of-touch agenda and the desires of Big Oil and big polluters before the interests of the American people, the need to create jobs, and the health of our environment. This appropriations bill is more than just a danger to the health and safety of American families. It represents the worst assault on clean air and clean water in our Nation's history.

This legislation slashes funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 18 percent. The majority has shown time and time again that it opposes any environmental regulation that might hurt the bottom line of polluters. But it doesn't stop there.

This legislation also slashes the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which helps States finance wastewater system improvements by providing 55 percent of the resources, meaning that America's waterways will be put at risk of sewage and urban runoff pollution, and good middle class jobs will be lost. And it cuts the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which protects national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges from development, by 78 percent. In addition, this partisan legislation includes at least 38 policy riders that, for purely ideological reasons, would harm American families and the environment.

The bill would prohibit the EPA from implementing rules to protect communities from power plant pollution. It blocks the EPA from restoring Clean Water Act protections to more than half of our Nation's streams and 20 million acres of wetlands, meaning the drinking water of 117 million Americans is put at risk. It blocks the EPA from moving forward on fuel efficiency standards that will reduce foreign oil imports and cut pollution. It blocks the EPA from regulating carbon pollution at power plants, refineries, and industrial sites. It even stops indefinitely long overdue standards to control air pollution from toxic mercury, endangering pregnant women, infants and children.

This legislation would open up more of our coastline to offshore drilling and 1 million acres of land around the Grand Canyon, a national treasure, to toxic uranium mining.

Mr. Chairman, there was a time when the Republican Party was known as defenders of the environment. It was a Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt, who inaugurated the National Forest Service and who worked to conserve 230 million acres of American land, including the Grand Canyon, which is now put at risk. He called the canyon, and I quote, a natural wonder, which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. "Leave it as it is,'' he said. "You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.''

It was a Republican President, Richard Nixon, who signed significant expansions of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and who brought life to the Environmental Protection Agency. Twenty years later, another Republican President, George Bush, Sr., expanded the Clean Air Act even further to protect Americans' health.

Yet today, a Republican majority brings us an Interior appropriations bill which undoes all of this good work, which endangers American families and threatens to do permanent and irrevocable damage to the environment.

I urge my colleagues in the majority, return to your roots to once again put the American people before the interests of polluters, and to oppose this disastrous legislation.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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