Senior Democratic lawmakers yesterday began mobilizing to savage a GOP plan to slice $1.5 billion in Energy Department loans for fuel-efficient cars, a standoff set to raise blood pressure on the Hill ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline for keeping the government funded.

At issue is a continuing resolution (CR) that House Republicans are bringing to a floor vote next week that gives lawmakers an extra nine weeks of fiscal 2012 to agree on spending blueprints while adding more than $3 billion in paid-for disaster recovery aid (E&E Daily, Sept. 15).

Democrats objected yesterday to what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the "dangerous precedent" of insisting on offsets to help victims of natural emergencies. But the president's party was just as vehement in condemning Republicans for targeting the clean-vehicle fund -- even as the GOP also savages a separate loan program for sending more than half a billion dollars to the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar firm.

Pelosi called the DOE efficient-cars program, known as Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing and created during the George W. Bush administration, "something that we all fought for.

"[T]o take the money from there is to take the money from the future, diminish our competitiveness internationally," she told reporters. "I think it's a very bad choice, as do my members."

Her second-in-command, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), sent a similar message as he charged the GOP with "cutting off our nose to spite our face" in a floor tussle with Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) over the clean-car loan cuts.

Cantor defended the move to offset the disaster aid as "a concerted effort to act responsibly," noting that DOE has $4 billion in total unobligated money for electric and high-tech vehicle loans. "It is worthy of note that this money has been laying around since September 2008," he added.

Hoyer shot back that the loan fund has "billions of dollars in pending requests" and estimated that as many as 60,000 new jobs would be created if those carmakers received DOE loans. Yet independent auditors at the Government Accountability Office in June questioned the delay in assessing those proposals, reporting that DOE is short on "engineering expertise" and "sufficient, quantifiable performance measures" to ensure the program's success.

Among the companies still awaiting word on a loan application to the program is Chrysler Group LLC, which first began seeking a $3 billion infusion from DOE during the height of the domestic auto industry's financial struggles.

The loan fund has disbursed more than $9 billion since its creation in 2008, creating more than 38,000 direct jobs, according to a summary released by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal-leaning think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. Those DOE job-creation estimates have faced broad scrutiny in recent days, however, as the presidential seal of approval given to Solyndra faded in a flurry of finger-pointing.

Whether Democrats can stop House Republicans from using the cars fund as an offset ultimately may depend on the upper chamber, where the slim Democratic majority affords more leverage. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday won passage of $6.9 billion in emergency-designated disaster aid on a 62-37 vote, but few in his party were prepared to predict how the battle would end.

"I strongly oppose cutting the program," Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said, adding that he "would expect" to stand against the House CR in its current form, "but I have to see the context of what comes up."

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), a centrist appropriator, warned against holding "people who have experienced losses hostage" to the debate over where to offset disaster aid. "My expectation is that we will find cuts," he said, declining to predict what would become of the DOE-cuts proposal in such a compromise.

One of Detroit's stalwarts in the House suggested that those looking to preserve the clean-vehicles funding could view the Senate as a backstop, setting up a standoff between the chambers over a CR with two weeks remaining until government funding expires.

"I'd like to stop it before then, but that is one way," Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) said.

Climate link

Notably, some liberal critics of the clean-car loan cuts connected the natural disasters that have sparked the run on federal emergency funds with the hazardous effects of climate change -- and they argued that the DOE program seeks to combat that.

"The Republican CR cuts funding to fight climate change to pay for disasters caused by climate extremes," Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the House Energy and Commerce Committee's top Democrat, said in a statement yesterday. "It makes as much sense as cutting vaccine funding to pay the costs of a measles outbreak. ... If we want to avoid future weather disasters, we need to increase -- not cut -- investments in clean vehicles and other clean energy technologies."

Daniel Weiss and Valeri Vazquez of CAP, the White House-allied think tank, echoed that sentiment in a column yesterday.

"Helping Americans suffering from economic damages caused by extreme weather -- the storms, floods, and droughts linked to climate change -- should be a top priority," they wrote. "But chopping this program would compound economic harm by ... eradicating tens of thousands of jobs as companies retool to build more efficient vehicles for the future."