What looks to be the final spending fight of the 2012 fiscal year is set to go down to the wire -- a fitting culmination for a budget cycle dominated by crippling acrimony over GOP riders aimed at tripping up White House environmental policy.

The text of an omnibus appropriations package for the remaining months of the fiscal year is now set for release sometime today, House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) confirmed last night. Rogers chalked up the one-day delay to "dotting our Is and crossing our Ts," vowing that "we'll get it done" before current government funding expires Friday at midnight.

But under House GOP leaders' three-day rule for advance release of legislation, a first vote on the omnibus could not happen until Thursday, leaving a small window for Senate consideration before the deadline. Moreover, the dozens of U.S. EPA and Interior Department policy riders under consideration for a final deal, which last week threatened to force those agencies out of the omnibus and into a continuing resolution (CR), appeared less than fully resolved last night.

"Nothing's agreed to until everything's agreed to," the House Appropriations panel's top Democrat, Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington, told reporters last night as he cautiously identified "a few things left still of concern."

Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, the House Republican leading 2012 budget talks for EPA and Interior, followed Rogers in repeatedly declining to address specific riders attached to his subpanel's bill. But Dicks hinted at the fate of a few in less-than-certain fashion, stating that GOP curbs on EPA regulations for mountaintop-removal mining would be a concern "if [they] were in" the final deal -- suggesting they are not -- and describing a block on EPA's emissions rule for industrial boilers as "not in our bill ... so far."

That rider blocking EPA's so-called boiler MACT rule, however, remains in play as an add-on to House Republican legislation extending a White House-backed payroll tax cut (see related story).

As appropriators joined lobbyists, activists and rank-and-file colleagues in awaiting a final Congressional Budget Office score for the omnibus bill, several held out hope that they could eke out a serviceable bipartisan majority that would mark a major victory for their oft-beleaguered committees.

"I'm pleased we are where we are," Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the top Senate Republican appropriator for EPA and Interior, said yesterday. "I just hope we will actually be able to take up the omnibus and not have to move to a CR."

Such an outcome for the two agencies Murkowski supervises was a real possibility late last week, with the two parties still far apart on their negotiations over the 38 policy riders attached to the House GOP's Interior and EPA spending bill (E&E Daily, Dec. 8).

Murkowski suggested that Democratic unease over the House GOP gambit on the payroll tax extension could be contributing to the delay in public release of the omnibus.

Environmentalists continued hammering Republicans yesterday over the still-unidentified riders expected to become law as part of the package, with League of Conservation Voters Vice President for Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld slamming the appropriations policy limits as "Christmas come early to Big Oil and other corporate polluters."

Asked to estimate the timeframe for the final bill's release, Rogers said "during the day" today.

Reporters Katie Howell, Jeremy Jacobs, and Phil Taylor contributed.