A massive omnibus appropriations bill approved by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on March 23 includes big increases for the main EPA programs that help communities finance improvements to water and wastewater infrastructure. The bill, which funds the federal government for the remainder of the 2018 fiscal year, delivered these funding increases despite President Trump’s effort last year to slash EPA appropriations by more than 30 percent.
The final omnibus spending legislation provides an extra $300 million each for EPA’s Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds (SRFs), compared with their FY17 totals. With this increase the DWSRF will receive $1.163 billion this year while the CWSRF is in line for just under $1.694 billion, representing the highest annual SRF appropriations since the 2010 fiscal year. A “Buy American” mandate requiring the use of domestic iron and steel on SRF-funded projects will remain in place for 2018.
EPA’s Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program is also a big winner in the appropriations bill, with the program receiving a total of $63 million in FY18 – more than double its 2017 funding level. While $8 million of this sum is reserved for administrative expenses at EPA, lawmakers say the funding directed for loan subsidization could generate more than $6 billion worth of water infrastructure investment.
The spending legislation also rejects nearly all of the most severe programmatic cuts and eliminations that President Trump had sought in last year’s budget request. For example, the explanatory statement accompanying the Interior-EPA portion of the omnibus bill specifically rejects the proposed elimination of the WaterSense program. The statement goes on to explain that the omnibus bill “does not support reductions proposed in the budget request unless explicitly noted” by lawmakers – a provision that should shield EPA’s Water Security Division against elimination as proposed by the White House.
The dramatically higher infrastructure funding levels for EPA are a direct result of a two-year budget framework agreed to by House and Senate leaders in February. The deal called for making available an additional $10 billion in each of the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years to fund a variety of infrastructure projects across the water, wastewater, transportation, energy and other sectors. The omnibus bill ended up directing more than $700 million of these funds toward EPA to support increased funding for the SRFs, WIFIA and other infrastructure and environmental cleanup programs – though these additional funds were not taken into account in statements from appropriators claiming that the bill held EPA’s total FY18 funding level steady at $8.1 billion. When the additional infrastructure funds are factored in, EPA’s FY18 budget actually increased to roughly $8.8 billion.
With the FY18 appropriations process now complete, lawmakers will soon begin working on their FY19 spending bills. The budget agreement that promised an additional $10 billion for infrastructure in 2019 remains in effect, meaning that the SRFs and WIFIA have a good chance to enjoy similarly high funding levels next year in spite of President Trump’s FY19 budget request.