EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler testified in defense of the Trump administration’s FY20 budget request at a trio of congressional hearings this month and consistently encountered resistance from both sides of the aisle over its plan to drastically reduce the agency’s budget. But Wheeler used his testimony to frame water infrastructure investments as a top priority, even though the budget proposal would lessen funding for those objectives.
Administrator Wheeler testified at respective House and Senate appropriations subcommittee hearings on the budget, plus a hearing of the House Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee. As submitted to Congress, Trump’s FY20 budget plan would reduce EPA spending from its FY19 level of just over $8.8 billion to $6.1 billion next year. The plan seeks $863 million and $25 million, respectively, for the DWSRF and WIFIA programs in FY20. The DWSRF received $1.164 billion in FY19, while WIFIA was awarded $68 million.
Despite the budget’s proposed cuts to EPA spending, Wheeler told the committees that water is a priority for the administration. In his testimony to House appropriators, for example, Wheeler framed water issues as “the largest and most immediate environmental and public health issues affecting the world right now.” He noted the agency’s own estimates of the need for more than $700 billion in water infrastructure investments over the next 20 years, and applauded the leveraging ability of WIFIA and the recycling of funds in the SRFs that generate “additional funding available well beyond the annual federal investment” in the programs. Wheeler also stressed that the White House budget requested a total of $83 million to begin funding five new water-related grant programs authorized by Congress last year through America’s Water Infrastructure Act.
Wheeler encountered numerous questions during the three hearings on the budget’s proposal to reduce DWSRF funding by more than $300 million. In response to a member of the House Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee who questioned the cuts, Wheeler noted that roughly $80 billion is currently revolving at the state level in the two SRFs, and also argued that the administration was proposing to increase WIFIA funding by 25 percent compared to the administration’s FY19 budget request for WIFIA. However, when compared to the amount of funding Congress actually appropriated for the program last year, the White House’s FY20 budget proposal would reduce WIFIA funding by $43 million, or about 63 percent.
The consensus from lawmakers at all three hearings seemed to be that Congress would not go along with the administration’s recommendations of severe EPA cuts in its own FY20 spending bills. But details of potential spending levels for EPA’s water infrastructure programs will not be known until Congress begins developing its funding legislation later this year.