Purse Strings and Policy

Congress influences Environmental Protection Agency policies when it passes targeted legislation, such as amendments to the federal pesticides law. Lawmakers also exert important, yet less-noticed, sway over EPA activities when they pass bills providing funds to the agency each year.

A number of provisions affecting EPA's pesticide, commercial chemical, and pollutant policies are included in a law (P.L. 109-54) that President George W. Bush signed on Aug. 2. That law provides funds for EPA and the Department of Interior in fiscal 2006, which begins on Oct. 1.

Members of Congress who hold the purse strings for EPA affect the agency's policies in a number of ways. They add to or subtract from the funding of various initiatives at EPA, including those that support chemical testing and research. They also include legislative directives to the agency in the funding bills. Plus they put policy recommendations in the three reports that accompany each yearly spending bill. These reports come from Senate and House appropriations committees and from the Senate-House conference committee that hammers out a final version of EPA's funding law. This year's law contains quite a few provisions affecting policy.

One area addressed is EPA's consideration of experiments involving the intentional dosing of humans with pesticides (C&EN, Aug. 1, page 27). The newly enacted legislation forbids EPA to consider or to perform such studies until the agency issues a final rule on the subject. The statute also establishes a tight deadline for EPA to issue the rule. The agency must finalize it in early 2006.

The new law says the forthcoming rule cannot allow the use of pregnant women, infants, or children as subjects. It also mandates that EPA establish an independent Human Subjects Review Board. A draft version of EPA's proposal, which is undergoing review at the White House Office of Management & Budget, would establish the human subjects board but would not specifically prohibit all tests on pregnant women, infants, and children (C&EN, Aug. 15, page 23). How this issue will play itself out before EPA puts out the final version of the rule early next year remains to be seen.

The fees that pesticide companies must pay to EPA are also addressed in the House appropriators' report. Lawmakers chided the Bush Administration for trying to collect additional fees for setting maximum allowable residues, called tolerances, of pesticides on foods. This plan conflicts with the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA), a law enacted in early 2004 that prohibits EPA from collecting any new tolerance fees and raised industry fees for pesticide registrations, the House report notes.

As part of a White House effort to garner additional funds for the U.S. Treasury, EPA in February proposed a regulation to collect $46 million in pesticide fees--$26 million for registration and $20 million for tolerances. In response, Congress in May tacked an amendment onto a supplemental 2005 appropriations measure (P.L. 109-13) to prohibit EPA from issuing any rule setting tolerance fees.

"EPA should not spend time proposing fees and promulgating rules in conflict with PRIA and should use its limited resources on other, more productive, pesticide work," House appropriators wrote in their report on the agency's 2006 funding legislation. The new spending law, however, specifically authorizes EPA to collect fees from companies for processing pesticide registrations.

Meanwhile, the agency's new spending law also maintains federal funding for EPA's High Production Volume (HPV) Challenge Program. Through this effort, begun in 1998, chemical manufacturers are voluntarily providing basic toxicity data on hundreds of substances produced or imported in the U.S. in volumes of 1 million lb or more per year (C&EN, Dec. 13, 2004, page 23). The Bush Administration in February proposed a cut of $3 million for this program in 2006, noting that the HPV effort is coming to a completion at the end of this year. But in March, three chemical trade associations announced that they will extend this initiative by providing EPA with data on hundreds more HPV chemicals not included in the original program (C&EN, March 21, page 34).

For 2006, Congress added $1.36 million over the President's request of $11.4 million in HPV funding, according to EPA spokesman David Ryan. Mary Bernhard, director of federal relations for the American Chemistry Council, the industry group involved with HPV from its outset, says the extra dollars will provide needed resources for EPA to review companies' plans for testing HPV chemicals, accept toxicity data submitted by industry, and post this information on the Web.

ACC also is pleased that Congress added about $1.5 million to the President's request of $9 million for research on chemicals suspected of disrupting the endocrine system, Bernhard adds.

In addition, the new law directs the agency to abide by an environmental justice executive order, issued by President Bill Clinton in 1994, to help address pollution-related disparities experienced by minority and low-income communities. Bush Administration officials are revising EPA's environmental justice strategy and reportedly planned to eliminate references to race and income.

The law also contains language delaying an EPA Clean Air Act rule that would require manufacturers of small engines to curb emissions from lawn mowers, chain saws, and similar outdoor equipment. Sen. Christopher S. (Kit) Bond (R-Mo.) has championed this provision, which he says will save manufacturing jobs at Briggs & Stratton plants in his home state. The legislation stops EPA from finalizing a small-engine emissions rule until the agency completes a technical study of safety issues, including the risks of burns to those using the equipment from added emission-control devices.

"This basically involves the allegation that putting baby catalytic converters on lawn mowers could start fires," says Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. "But new EPA evidence shows that lawn mowers with catalysts are actually cooler and thus less likely to do this," he says. Lawn mowers and other small engines are a major source of air pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, that help form ground-level ozone, or smog, in the summer, O'Donnell points out.

Congress also struck down the Bush Administration's plan to give about $25 million of EPA's $742 million science and technology budget for 2006 to the agency's regulatory programs. The idea was for the program offices to use the money in a fee-for-service arrangement with the agency's Office of Research & Development for short-term projects addressing high-priority issues (C&EN, Feb. 21, page 24). But appropriators nixed this plan without explanation in reports accompanying the funding legislation.

CONGRESSIONAL appropriators brought home federal pork to their districts by setting aside more than $33 million of the EPA science and technology budget for noncompetitive research grants. Some of these so-called earmarks are small--less than half a million dollars each. The largest was the $3 million directed to the Alexandria, Va., nonprofit Water Environment Research Foundation. Texas scored the most in these noncompetitive research grants, with institutions within the state together getting $5.55 million. An earmarked grant of $750,000 will go to the New England Green Chemistry Consortium.

This research pork, however, is a comparative drop in the bucket considering the $200 million set aside for legislators' earmarks for construction or improvement of wastewater treatment plants.

Congressional appropriators created somewhat of a stir over the cleanup of polychlorinated biphenyls contamination in New York's Hudson River. EPA is requiring General Electric to dredge PCBs from a 40-mile stretch of the river (C&EN, Aug. 6, 2001, page 8). Whether dredging is the best way to clean PCBs from waterways is a contentious issue. It pivots on whether scooping up and removing sediments--and churning up buried PCBs--is better for the environment than leaving the tainted sands and mud alone.

Rep. Charles H. Taylor (R-N.C.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees EPA funding, consulted with GE before adding language in his panel's report calling for the National Academy of Sciences to study PCB dredging and alternative cleanup methods. Among other things, the House report asks NAS to determine whether the costs of projects match EPA estimates and whether the dredging will reduce risks from PCB exposure significantly faster than leaving the river to recover naturally from the contamination. The requested study would revisit a 2001 NAS examination of PCB-contaminated sediments (C&EN, Jan. 15, 2001, page 12).

Mark L. Behan, GE spokesman on environmental issues in New York, tells C&EN that Taylor approached GE about the dredging issue in the spring of this year. Behan says the NAS 2001 study needs to be updated because of new information about managing contaminated sediments. The new NAS study "should have no effect whatsoever on the [Hudson dredging] project with respect to the timing of it," he says, but would be "an information-gathering exercise."

Release of the House report brought outcries from environmental groups and from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) saying that an additional study would delay dredging of the Hudson. Shortly after the House issued its report--but before the Senate compiled its report--EPA announced that, for technical reasons, it was pushing back the date for the Hudson dredging from 2006 to 2007.

The Senate Appropriations Committee in its report, however, recommended against a new NAS study.

To resolve this disagreement, the House-Senate conference committee hammered out a deal for NAS to evaluate dredging projects at some Superfund sites, which may include the Hudson River. This study is to be finished by the end of 2006 and must not delay the Hudson dredging project.

Congress has long influenced Executive Branch agencies through its legislative and spending authorities. Through policy directives, financial nudges, and a little pork in EPA's 2006 spending law, Congress is helping shape federal environmental policy.