WASHINGTON – The tight $7.89 billion budget proposed for the Environmental Protection Agency has left some Democratic senators dissatisfied.
“I want to express my disappointment, frankly,” Chairman Jack Reed said in an appropriations hearing Wednesday. “We work awfully hard… to make sure there is adequate resources for the EPA facing significant challenges.”
This is the fifth year in a row that EPA’s the proposed budget has been less than the year prior, according to Reed. The Rhode Island Democrat expressed concern that the EPA will not be able to meet future infrastructure needs with reduced budgets year after year.
“I find it baffling that the [Obama] administration would come up with this budget and that you would come here and say that everything’s fine,” Reed said to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.
McCarthy assured the Senate Appropriations interior, environment and related agencies subcommittee that the budget “invests our funds and leverages funds of our partners where it makes the most sense and gets the biggest bang for the buck.”
The spending plan, which should go into effect on Oct. 1, also cuts employment at the EPA, allowing for the lowest staffing since 1989.
Despite what Reed and other committee members found to be major setbacks in the budget, there will be $200 million appropriated to climate change programs and $23 million provided to increase chemical safety.
“All things being equal I would have loved to have given you a budget that was much larger,” McCarthy responded. “But we had choices to make.”