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Carolina, Washington and Idaho was cut from the administration's request of
$350 million to $292 million. Total funding for the DOE's renewable energy
programs was $14 million higher than the administration's request, for a total
of $389 million.
A longstanding dispute over funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste
disposal facility was resolved, enabling appropriators to include the Energy
and Water bill in the omnibus. The Yucca Mountain project will receive no
increase in funding over FY04, and the $577 million budget does not include the
provision requested by the administration that would have allowed the
Department of Energy to spend the money without congressional oversight.
Congress increased total funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration to $3.9 billion. Although this figure includes new funding for a
program to help implement recommendations from the National Ocean Commission
report on the declining health of ocean ecosystems, key wildlife and water
quality programs and agencies, such as the National Marine Fisheries Service,
were cut or did not receive additional funding.
Omnibus spending bills often contain anti-environment policy provisions that
are inserted at the last minute with little public debate; H.R. 4818 is no
exception. The bill contains a rider that will expedite the handover of more
than 100,000 acres of important wildlife habitat in the Yukon Flats National
Wildlife Refuge to a corporation that wants to drill for oil on the land.
Another rider excludes from environmental review the renewal of grazing permits
for many allotments in national forests. Another provision limits judicial
review and public input in connection with logging projects within the Tongass
National Forest. Other riders remove three roads within Georgia's Cumberland
Island Wilderness Area from wilderness protection and codify the Bush
administration's rule to double snowmobile use in Yellowstone National Park
this winter. Environmentalists were able to block two proposed riders that
would have undermined the Endangered Species Act. If successful, these measures
would have completely exempted the principle law regulating pesticides in the
United States from the Endangered Species Act and would have made it far easier
for mining, logging and other harmful activities on federally designated
critical habitat to go forward.
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