Budget

Even as they face a veto threat from the White House, House Democratic leaders have teed up debate on EPA’s fiscal year 2020 spending bill, allowing for floor consideration of amendments that would block several Trump EPA priorities, including measures that roll back climate rules for new power plants and attack the basis for mercury limits.

EPA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) says that at the halfway point of fiscal year 2019 it has more than tripled its target for annual “return on investment” by producing $295 million in cost savings, monetary benefits and additional fines for the agency, but achieved no environmental improvements or regulatory changes in the same period.

EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) are poised to end grant funding they have jointly provided for the past two decades to more than a dozen children's health research centers though officials say they will provide some funds for children's health issues though it is likely to be significantly less, and more narrowly focused, than in the past.