Congress Lurches from "Must Pass" to "Must Pass"

might make it to the President's desk. Hello, and welcome back to Parts per Billion, the podcast from Bloomberg environment I'm your host, David Schultz, and we're coming to you from Capitol Hill today because the August recess is over and now it's a big legislative sprint from now until Christmas. And I'm joined by Bloomberg Environments Capitol Hill reporter Dean Scott. Dean, how are you great to be here, David? So yeah, let's talk about that legislative sprint. And first off, let's

start off with just this month. The fiscal year, of course ends at the end of this year, and there are several things that must pass before the end of the fiscal year. Let's talk about those and will there

be any environmental provisions attached to those bills? Sure? Well, we have a couple different tracks, but it's all money, money, money, Because we're almost at the end of the fiscal year, which is September thirtieth, so we have about three weeks to go, and in that time we have a couple things that are well that we''ll be watching very closely in the next couple weeks. The first is on spending.

We have two things that we cover very closely, the EPA and Department of Interior Appropriation spending Bill and the Energy and Water Bill. And this is the bill. These are the bills that basically say, hey, federal agency, here's how much you can spend for the coming year. And if Congress doesn't pass these bills, the agencies shut down. That's right, and then they also have some policy in

those bills, usually around the margins. The big issue this year is that the House has passed its versions of those bills and the Senate has been a bit tardy. And in the end, where that's left us is we're in September and we're less than thirty days away from the end of the fiscal year, and we have no

Senate spending bills approved on the floor. So given that, I get the sense from everything I've been hearing and from what you've been reporting, that we're going to have a continuing resolution, which is essentially Congress's version of saying, let's just move the deadline back a couple weeks or a couple months, Is that right, that's right, So any bills that don't make it. So let's take our EPA

interior and then energy and water bills as examples. If neither of those bills were packaged with other things on the floor in past, then we would need continuing resolutions, some short term extension for spending for one or both of those. And the reason why these are important is at least important to us and important to the people who care about the environment, is there are all kinds of things that can be added on to these bills

that affect the environment. You know, you never know what's going to be added on, But can you talk a little bit about, you know, what are some potential ideas that you've heard in the past, or potential pieces of likelegislation that might you know, hitch a ride on these sort of bigger bills. Sure well, on the EPA Interior bill. The key thing that we're watching is take EPA spending. For example, in the House, they have near record EPA figures in terms of an annual budget, so you really

get a big boost in EPA spending. If the Senate went along with that number, we expect that to be a somewhat more modest number, and we'll know a bit more about that on Thursday when they release essentially the allocations from the Appropriations Committee. Here in the Senate, you'll always see things in the in the EPA and Interior Bill that would restrict some EPA policy. The thing that we're watching closely this year, it's the first year that

the House was controlled by Democrats. Let's take a step back and talk about must pass bills in general. You know, in how Congress works now, it seems like the the you know, not a lot of bills get passed out of Congress and make their way to the President's desk. The only ones that typically do were these must pass bills, like you mentioned, the spending bills, because if they don't pass, we have a government shutdown. Is this how Congress operates now?

You know, we just have must pass bills and then try to add on as many things as you can to those bills. Yeah, and the list of must pass bills seems to grow each year, partly because they miss a lot of their deadlines. More and more this year, for example, I'm looking at three big let's call them big categories of bills that must pass. One is we've already spoken about, is the continuing resolution or an EPA and Interior spending bill. The twelve appropriation spending bills that

need to be passed. We'll know as we get closer to September thirtieth which ones will require continuing resolution, and that's supposed to last, give them let's say thirty sixty ninety days of breathing room, and then they'll have to actually pass full year appropriations bills, which would then run through September of next year. We have the Defense Authorization Bill, which is a must pass built and we're gonna get

to that a little bit more in a bit. But that's interesting in that it's a must pass bill, but there's not really a hard deadline for that, right. You know, if they go past the fiscal year, there's now a lot of nothing catastrophic happens. That's right. And we're watching the Defense Authorization build closely though in the environmental arena, because there's mainly there's two to three subject areas that

we're watching closely. One is there's a lot of climate change language in the Defense Authorization Bill, there's always been some language that says, hey, Pentagon, you should be looking at the impacts that climate change has on your defense installations, your operations overseas. This could be anything from impacts of clout we call them climate refugees, but the movements of people across border, across borders. We also have a stronger, stronger language in the House build this year on what

actions the Pentagon should take around the climate change. And then we have two other areas which deal with the pfoss chemical issue, the exposures to that chemical and that group of chemicals. And we should say that this is this is a really big area that both you and I have been covering a lot. These are these chemicals that are sort of used a lot in firefighting foam

and have been used a lot on military basis. They are linked to some pretty bad health effects, and there are a lot of really interesting policy measures in this defense bill that would direct the Pentagon what to do about these chemicals. And it'll be really interesting to see

what winds up in the in the final version of that. Yeah, and then there's one that we've also followed closely to has some climate relationship to climate change, which is the Used Act, which is a carbon capture bill that has passed the Senate, not the House Carbon captured. We'd explain

that a little bit. If you're drilling for oil and gas and you use carbon dioxide, which is sort of the most ubiquitous climate pollutant that we have, if you use that material and you pump it in underground, you can recover deeper deposits of natural gas and oil, and if you do it right, you can seal that carbon dioxide underground. We've had some increase in those incentives in

terms of tax incentives. For example, this latest bill also includes additional money for research and also for technologies that do direct air capture, which is this sort of next generation technology that would actually pull carbon dioxide right out of the air. And this is something that from my understanding, has some Republican support. It does, and Senate Basso, who's the chairman of the Environment Committee here in the Senate,

is a big advocate. But it also has Senator white House from Rhode Island who's a big sort of climate hawk we call them over here in the Senate. So that's going to be important to watch. Also to see whether that stays in Before we move on to the rest of the year, we should talk you mentioned there's, you know, the must pass spending bills to avert a government shutdown. There's the must pass Defense bill to avert a defense not working properly, to phrase it, very in artfully.

And then there's programs that are set to expire, that have their legal authorization expire that probably everyone wants to see renewed, but you know, not sure how it can be. Let's touch briefly on one of those, the National Flood

Insurance Program. That's right, So the National Flood Insurance Program of courses is getting even more attention of late because we have yet another round of hurricane damage in the US, and that, as you know that the flood insurance program is always struggling, needs to be reauthorized and then whenever we need to reauthorize it, there is a debate, particularly among more conservative members of Congress, as to just how much money we're shoveling into national flood insurance and whether

we should be more let's say, strict about whether property owners can rebuild in areas that are more prone for future hurricane damage. But again, they're up against an also a September thirtieth deadline, and I think, you know, I would if you were to be a betting person around

that you would not necessarily see that being reauthorized in time. Yeah, and I don't think anyone in Congress from any party, any you know, ideological stripe, wants to see the National Flood Insurance Program expire right in the middle of a hurricane season. Finally, though, let's talk about, you know, the state of play for the rest of this year and

into next year. You know what I've seen so far this year, and you know a lot better than me, But it seems like the Democrats in the House and the Republicans in the Senate don't have a lot of eagerness to cut a deal and to negotiate and to sort of compromise and send really big environmental packages to the White House. Do you see that changing next year, when a lot of members are going to be up for reelection and start to think like, oh, I need to have something I can bring back home and wave

to my constituents when I'm campaigning. I think through the end of this year, I would look to see at least, you know, some incremental progress on a number of energy bills. There's a lot of there's the feeling in the Senate Energy Committee from the chairman Lisa Mrikowski from Alaska and the top Democrat, Joe Mentioned from West Virginia, that they really do want to produce something from their work on climate and energy. These would be very moderate bills and

probably be incremental. They might include things like energy efficiency. I would expect to see some more movement on those bills. So we're going to see activity and we're going to see some progress. I doubt we'll see much pasted on the Senate floor because they're going to need something to hitch that onto. We'll be watching closely for another big conservation bill, the Land, Water and Conservation fun There'll be another effort. We're going to an election year. There are

many Republicans and Democrats who like who like conservation. It's sort of a safe area and the environmental space to promote that you have green credentials. The problem is next year. The closer we get to the November twenty twenty election, the less we'll see things get done. Yes, there'll be some effort, probably by Senator McConnell, who runs the Senate here.

We'll see some effort to perhaps give some floor time to members or to legislation that's favored by some vulnerable members such as Corey Gardner and Colorado, or even Senator McSally from Arizona. We could see some things that come to the floor to give them a chance to sort of promote whatever it is that will help them with voters,

including some green issues like conservation. But that said, the closer we get every election cycle to the actual election, the less that seems to actually get done in the US Congress. Yeah, that's a really good point. So I guess it's the opposite of what I kind of was expecting for next year, although it sounds like what you're saying is, you know, if you're looking for environmental action in the Senate next year, expected to have something to

do with Colorado and or Arizona. All Right, Well, that was it. Thank you so much, Dean for that rundown. That was Dean Scott Bloomberg Environments Capitol Hill reporter. You can follow him at newstt Bloomberg environment dot com. That's where his and all of our stories get posted. Today's podcast was produced by myself along with Marissa Horn and Jessica Coombs. Nicholas Anzeloda is our audio engineer. The music for this episode of the podcast is a message by

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