Budget

The House Appropriations Committee has approved an EPA spending bill for fiscal year 2018 that provides the agency with significantly more than what the Trump administration had sought though the bill's passage offers a prelude to further negotiations among both House and Senate lawmakers over funding levels and policy riders.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is urging EPA in a new report to set up a new surveillance program to monitor scientific literature and new studies about health effects occurring at low exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals, in part because of concern that EPA's existing regulatory testing methods might miss these effects by not regularly testing at lower dose levels.

A House subcommittee has advanced with bipartisan support a draft Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) reauthorization bill that would boost funding for EPA's water infrastructure loans and expand the agency's reviews of state programs, even as Senate Democrats are pressing the agency to step up its SDWA oversight, especially on lead contamination.

Even as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt works to roll back a host of Obama-era rules as a relatively short-term priority, he is preparing a set of medium-term plans for the agency's budget and policy agenda that would remake the agency and institutionalize the Trump administration's deregulatory agenda.