EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy made a series of visits to Capitol Hill over the past month to testify on the agency’s FY17 budget request and defend its proposal to trim overall State Revolving Fund (SRF) funding by more than 10 percent compared to current levels.
In consistent testimony delivered during a series of congressional budget hearings, Administrator McCarthy expressed support for the Drinking Water and Clean Water SRFs but explained that constraints on the amount of funding available for EPA’s budget led the agency to recommend cutting the SRF budget by $257 million next year, to just under $2 billion. Under President Obama’s budget plan, the DWSRF would receive $1.02 billion of this total, $158 million above its current level, while the CWSRF would be cut by $414 million to $979.5 million.
McCarthy’s testimony to Congress also featured frequent praise for the new Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) pilot program, for which EPA requested $20 million in FY17. But McCarthy also repeatedly stressed that WIFIA is designed to offer low-cost loans to large-scale water projects, and is in no way intended to divert funding from the SRF programs.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle criticized EPA’s proposed SRF cuts as ill advised in the aftermath of the Flint water crisis, but the degree to which appropriators may be able to restore funding to the program appears to remain limited due to the constraints of the FY17 budget.