Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024
Floor Speech
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I rise to oppose this amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, this is another policy rider designed to block the EPA from doing its work to protect our air, our water, and public health. I know my constituents. They look to me to make good decisions because they want to have clean water to drink, to cook, and to bathe in, and the EPA working alongside the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency ensures that we have the best water quality standards around.
So, Madam Chair, on behalf of the Fourth District of Minnesota, I oppose this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition to this amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, ecosystems are in distress, and they are declining globally at rates we couldn't even have imagined. Human history will have more than 1 million species directly currently threatened with extinction within many decades. It will happen within some of our lifetimes.
This amendment seeks to legislate species rather than providing species with the protections that are afforded under the Endangered Species Act. The species live somewhere. The Endangered Species Act protects the habitat.
Madam Chair, think of the bald eagle and what we did to protect that, and how proud we all are of what we did to protect that. Those were other Members of Congress. Now we have the responsibility to do the same thing for the next generation.
This law would also potentially increase litigation regarding the government's responsibility to implement the statutory requirements under the Endangered Species Act. So that means more litigation and more taxpayers' dollars spent in litigation.
The best available science and commercial information, not politics, should determine whether a species is listed, threatened, or endangered. This amendment circumvents the rigorous process that is put in place to make those scientific determinations as well as the role of public input. There is public input that goes into this.
The primary factor influencing the viability of the Texas kangaroo rat is loss of its habitat largely related to historical land use changes. Human activities threaten to diminish animal habitats. They pollute nature. They accelerate global warming which is driving species to extinction and creating more unhealthy ecosystems. When we lose a species it impacts and reverberates throughout our ecosystem and we all suffer because our economy, our public health, livelihoods, food security, and quality of life all depend upon ecosystems working together.
Defunding the service's ability to list a species would work against the clear intent of the Endangered Species Act and would, as I said before, cause more litigation by outside groups, not less, but more litigation costing taxpayers more money.
Most importantly, Madam Chair, it would also undercut the service's ability to work collaboratively with Tribes who seek help on ecosystem protection, other Federal agencies, States, and local communities, and landowners who wish and want to work cooperatively to conserve species.
So, Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment and to protect vulnerable species so that future generations can benefit from a world with healthy ecosystems and robust biodiversity just as previous generations did for us, and the best example is the American bald eagle.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I claim time in opposition to the amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, this is just another more controversial poison pill rider that sadly shows some of the extremes that Republicans will go to.
Now, we need to be interested in laws that can gain bipartisan support and become law because people want us to work together and move forward. The draconian cuts proposed in this bill violate the agreement that was reached by Speaker McCarthy and President Biden that were memorialized in Public Law 118-5, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. I voted for that in good faith and thought we, as a Congress, were going to honor that commitment to those spending levels.
Now that I have said that, I want to get back to the amendment. In accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the BLM drafted a proposed draft resource management plan, an environmental impact statement that is currently open for a 90-day comment period. The public has been asked to comment. Your constituents can comment, and we have asked them to do that. This amendment would prohibit the BLM from providing an updated, comprehensive, and environmentally adequate framework for managing the uses of its public lands and resources.
We are here to protect the overall welfare of the American public and to preserve our lands and resources for future generations. Unfortunately, this would be disregarding the law and trying to circumvent the rigorous process that is in place to update the management plans to better address larger, higher intensity wildland fires, for example, something I know the gentleman and I have both worked on and both agree that we need to do so much more on to protect our public lands from wildland fires and private lands from it as well.
This amendment nullifies that public comment I was talking about before, 90 days public comment. We have invited the public in to make comments. We are currently collecting them. This amendment would say, you know, we asked you to comment, but we are just going to totally disregard it. We are not going to even look at it.
I believe we cannot close our eyes to the impacts of climate change we are experiencing. Our economy, our health, our livelihoods, food security, and quality of life all depend on healthy ecosystems and so does reducing and suppressing wildland fires, for example.
I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment and focus instead on work we can do together to address climate change and together being good stewards of our public lands and resources for the benefit of future generations.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I rise in strong opposition to this amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I know the gentleman doesn't see it this way, but I see this amendment as petty and punitive--the EPA and environmental justice. I live in a corridor, it is called I-94, and there was a thriving African-American community there. Absolutely thriving--undertakers, dentists, doctors, dry cleaners, grocery stores. It was an amazing place. However, it was the place of the least political resistance to put a highway through rather than over by the cathedral, which got a different speed limit and some other things that happened, or the mansions on Summit Avenue hill just a couple blocks away.
Snelling Avenue in my district has some of the worst air quality for the homes that are located around there because of the freeway. I can give example after example, and I just used transportation, but I can use other things.
I grew up in South St. Paul, a river town with a meatpacking plant. Swift Armour could just throw their waste right into the Mississippi River. The State of Wisconsin sued us not only for that waste but for the waste of our municipal waste plant that was there. That was in the poorest neighborhood around between Dakota and Washington County.
You can say it is about race, but it is about people who were taken advantage of because it was the most expedient thing to do. Now the Biden administration and other administrations have said, you know what, we have a responsibility to clean that up. We have a responsibility to do better, and that is a role that the environmental pollution control agency should be involved in because the water, the air, and the soil in many of these places is not anyplace where we would make an investment or where you would want to buy something.
I understand the gentleman has his viewpoint on what is going on. I just want you to hear from myself and on behalf of my constituents who are working to rectify a wrong. We are doing it in a positive way that moves forward; that is not dividing our communities, but it is uniting our communities. I don't think when we are mad at something or a policy that we should be going after individual public servants.
I would like to move forward, Madam Chair, and negotiate with the Senate a bill to fund the government and to move the EPA forward so we have clean air, clean water, and we protect our soil.
Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I am a little confused. I serve on this committee, and one of the debates that we had when we were doing the markup--and the Chair probably remembers--is how, in the base bill, all the money that he is talking about was stripped out. It is gone. We couldn't find offsets to put it back in, but it is gone. The money that the gentleman is referring to is gone.
Madam Chair, $1.4 billion was taken from EJ in the Inflation Reduction Act. It was taken away, so it is gone.
However, just getting into what we tried to do, Democrats did try to make historic investments in environmental justice, and the EPA has been able to put some of those dollars to use.
As I said, there is no EJ funding. There is zero in the base bill. It is unfortunate because I think environmental justice, as I said earlier, makes sure that everybody gets the same degree of protection from environmental health hazards.
Our rural communities and the community that I grew up in, which is an older suburb but at the time was very rural, were targeted by corporations, regulatory agencies, and local planning boards because the land was cheap and had been polluted. Then, they just kept siting more pollution around it like landfills or a waste transfer station. They thought it was a good place to put an incinerator, a garbage dump.
The amount of concentration of pollution in some of these areas is really mind-boggling because the mindset is that because it is already polluted, we can just put a little more there.
I know my colleague mentioned that he is a doctor, so I know he knows that when someone is exposed to a lot of chemicals, when someone is exposed to a lot of toxins, they have higher health disparities and shorter lifespans. That is all documented. In these populations, there are higher cancer rates.
As I said, the money is gone, unfortunately. I hope we can work with the Senate to put some things back, but I want my colleagues to just think for a minute that some of these communities started out with one waste facility or one toxic plant and then another one and another one and another one came. House values went down, and pretty soon, no one wanted to live there. In my case, in my community, it was right on the Mississippi River.
Like I said, I am a little confused by talking about the funding in this bill that no longer exists, and I am going to reserve the balance of my time because I think, Madam Chair, Members of this House know how I feel about this. I strongly oppose this amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, here we go again. We are attacking the salary of a person who is doing their job, Mr. Li.
Mr. Li has a really important job. Mr. Li's job is to regulate pesticides. Pesticides can be toxic. One of the things that got me involved in politics back when I served on the natural resources and agriculture subcommittee in the State of Minnesota was all the reading that we were doing about the accumulation of pesticides on food that children were ingesting because all the studies had been done for pesticides on an adult healthy male and how it could affect their development.
The more I learned about pesticides--and they are important. They are an important tool for our agriculture. We feed the world. We feed our folks here. If a pesticide isn't regulated--and I don't have the names right in front of me. Madam Chair, I will get them submitted for the record. Some of them are water-soluble.
We learned a lot about how pesticide companies would come in and target local farmers to have them use this pesticide, saying it was great, but it didn't break down in water. It would get into well water. It would get into streams. It would do terrible things to the ecosystem and streams.
In Minnesota, our farmers didn't want that, but they weren't scientists on a lot of that, so who do they turn to? They turned to scientific experts to do the due diligence, to check these pesticides out so when and if they are used, they are used properly so they do no harm. They only do good.
Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment and to support the EPA in its work to protect our public health and environment.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition to this amendment.
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Ms. McCOLLUM. We are now only 15 days away from a government shutdown, and instead of focusing on keeping the government open, we are working on a bill that is going nowhere.
The draconian cuts that I talked about earlier in this bill violate the agreement reached by former Speaker McCarthy and President Biden that were memorialized in statute and Public Law 118-5, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.
We would not be teetering on the brink of a government shutdown if my Republican colleagues had upheld their end of the bargain and funded at the levels we had agreed to and there was a vote that I did take in this body, so I feel I had a vested interest in thinking that we were going to honor that agreement.
We are here to protect the welfare of the American people, and we cannot close our eyes to the impacts of climate change, drought, flooding, severe storms, wildfires events that we are experiencing.
As of October 10, the United States has experienced 24 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each. This is a new record.
I could talk about the money that the Department of Defense, in the billions of dollars, is having to spend to make buildings resilient and to try to prevent buildings from collapsing due to these extreme weather events.
The Department of Defense sees climate change--the Department of Defense sees climate change, I want to stress this--as a national security issue. The Department of Defense invests in solar, and the EPA should not walk away from it.
When we have solar available, it is something that is a strategy that will help us in preventing the acceleration of climate change, instead of paying billions of dollars in disaster relief. I don't think that is what is best for the American taxpayer.
Our economy, our health, our livelihoods, our food security, our quality of life all depend on how the planet is a healthy ecosystem and doing what we can to mitigate climate change.
I state again that we have been working to bring wind and solar and bring the costs down, and many States, including Texas, are embracing a lot of this, and a lot of small businesses are coming forward.
I agree with my colleague on the other side of the aisle. I don't want to be purchasing solar panels from China. I want to manufacture them right here in the United States as part of a full energy embrace mix.
I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment and focus instead on addressing climate change, making our Nation stronger, and agreeing with the Department of Defense that climate change is a national security issue.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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