The head of the House Appropriations Committee yesterday said he expects fewer policy riders to be included in spending legislation in the new Congress than in the one that just ended -- including those designed to rein in environmental programs.

Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said in a brief interview with E&E Daily that he hopes the focus will remain on spending when Congress moves legislation in the coming months to resolve government and mandatory spending issues and raise the federal debt limit, not on extraneous issues.

"I would hope we would have fewer rather than more, and the negotiations between us and the Senate, I would like that to be over spending levels," he said.

Those negotiations could be bruising, but Rogers said he has a good relationship with his counterparts in both chambers -- Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the ranking House appropriator, and incoming Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), expected to become the committee's ranking member. He said the four plan to meet soon to discuss the path forward.

Republicans offered hundreds of policy riders to spending legislation in the 112th Congress, including many to pare back U.S. EPA's power to promulgate air and water quality standards. Almost none of them cleared the Senate, with a few exceptions, including a rider to delay enforcement of Department of Energy standards requiring more efficient light bulbs.

House Democrats yesterday said they believe their Republican colleagues have learned that the appropriations process is not an effective way to legislate on environmental issues.

"I don't think they're going to go after EPA on the policy issues; I just think it's going to be a policy of attrition of resources," said Rep. James Moran (D-Va.), top Democrat on the House subcommittee responsible for funding EPA. By giving EPA and other agencies less resources to enforce rules, Congress can achieve the same goal without having to do battle with the Senate over policy riders, he said.

"I don't want that to happen, because I think it's easier to beat back the riders than it is to beat back the spending cuts," he said.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said that tacking policy items onto the so-called fiscal cliff bills would create messaging problems for Republicans.

"The more they freight it down with, let's say, anti-Obamacare, anti-environmental issues, that get away from the business at hand -- namely, the budget -- the weaker it makes their argument," he said. "So that's a tactical decision they'll have to make."

Environmentalists are also hopeful that the new Congress will moderate the number of anti-EPA votes occurring in the House.

"The 112th Congress launched every missile they could at the EPA, and every objective assessment would show that virtually all of their attacks fell short," said John Walke, clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Republicans in the new Congress must decide, he said, "whether to waste their time lobbing missiles and throwing tantrums without those efforts becoming law."

Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said the strategy had proved equally ineffective as a political tool. Efforts in the last Congress to make Democrats like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) take tough votes in support of EPA regulations backfired, he said, and Republicans might look for new ways to score points with voters.

"Overall, the EPA will be a somewhat less viable target than it was two or three years ago," he said.

But despite Rogers' position, other key Republicans said that members would continue to offer amendments on issues they care deeply about, even if they face long odds in becoming enacted.

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), top Republican on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, said he expects members to offer about as many riders to must-pass spending legislation this winter and spring as in previous cycles, because "members want to."

"They hope to pass them. That's why they keep bringing them up," he said, adding that riders would appear only on federal spending legislation, not other bills Congress will take up in the near term to raise the debt ceiling or provide aid for Superstorm Sandy victims.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the former chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said that appropriations riders might not be ideal but offer an opportunity. "In a perfect world, you reopen the Clean Air Act and you really go through and make some changes to the law and some changes to the EPA," he said. "But we don't operate in a perfect world."

With a Democratic president and Senate, the appropriations process offers one of the few opportunities available to the House to enact policy, he said.

"By default, you fall back to doing some things on the appropriations process that, as part of a larger bill, can't be deleted," he said.

Reporter Jeremy P. Jacobs contributed.