A House subcommittee this morning advanced on a party-line vote a bill to significantly slash Interior Department, Forest Service and U.S. EPA spending while pushing more than two dozen policy riders aimed at reining in air and land protections and curtailing environmental lawsuits.

The $27.5 billion GOP bill, which is $2.1 billion below current spending and nearly $4 billion underneath the Obama administration's request, would prevent EPA from advancing a number of air quality regulations, reduce land acquisition funding to its lowest level in four decades and prohibit the Fish and Wildlife Service from listing new endangered species, among other things.

"This committee is taking meaningful steps to help put our country's fiscal house in order," said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the Interior and the Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, before passage of the bill on an 8-5 vote. "While reductions in discretionary spending alone will not erase the deficit, the bill before us this morning is a step forward in that direction."

The bill would slash more than $700 million from Interior, 7 percent below current spending, while limiting the implementation of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which Simpson argued needs substantial reforms and has not been reauthorized in 20 years.

Much of the spending cuts would come from land acquisition funding, a keystone of the Obama conservation agenda, along with steep reductions in FWS's cooperative endangered species program.

The bill makes even deeper cuts to EPA, which would receive $7.1 billion, an 18 percent cut from current levels -- which are 16 percent below the most recent appropriations bill for the agency.

The subcommittee's mark also would prevent EPA from advancing a number of regulations, including its greenhouse gas program for stationary sources such as utilities and oil refineries.

Simpson said his subcommittee turned away many proposals for further restrictions on EPA that he expects to see offered as the bill moves through the full committee and House floor. Some of them dealt with air toxics from boiler and electric utilities.

While no amendments were offered this morning by either party, Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia, the subcommittee's ranking Democrat, said he plans to make passage of the bill difficult in the Appropriations Committee.

"I expect there will be one major overriding amendment and then probably some smaller specific" ones, he said after the hearing. "I think it's going to be a long, drawn-out full committee process."

Simpson defends ESA cuts

Simpson sparred with subcommittee Democrats over the bill's proposals to restrict funding for new endangered species listings, for "uplistings" of species from threatened to endangered and for the designation of critical habitat to protect wildlife.

"Everybody agrees the Endangered Species Act needs to be reformed," Simpson said, citing Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's statements yesterday that the law has room for improvement. "I don't know what those specific changes should be, I have ideas, but that's something the [Natural] Resources Committee needs to work out."

Simpson said that while there have been 2,018 listings of species under the ESA since it was signed into law by President Nixon, only 21 species have been recovered. He added that the law was among 26 percent of the programs in the Interior and EPA bill that are yet to have their funding reauthorized.

"What we're trying to do is put pressure on all parties that have an interest in this to come to the table and sit down for reauthorization of ESA," Simpson said. "The fact is we spend far too much money in court instead of in recovering species."

His statement was challenged by Moran and full committee ranking member Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who argued that agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, which is funded at about $1 billion under the bill, has also not been reauthorized in decades.

"We've kept these programs alive because they're in the interest of the American people," Dicks said. "Why are we stopping now?"

"Because we haven't addressed it, and we ought to address it," Simpson replied. "We're sending a message."

Dicks also took a shot at a legislative rider from Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) to prevent environmental groups from challenging a future delisting of gray wolves in Wyoming. The state is meeting today with Salazar and FWS Director Dan Ashe to discuss a sustainable state management plan.

"If Wyoming had a plan that could stand up to scrutiny, with all due respect, that would protect the wolves and there could be delisting there, as well," Dicks said. "But they have not come up with a program yet that either Fish and Wildlife Service or Secretary Salazar said meets the basic requirement for the survival of the wolves."

Lummis after the hearing said she had to clutch her "frozen, dead hands" from grabbing the microphone and rebutting Dick's remarks.

"Clearly Mr. Dicks does not know the history of Wyoming's wolf plan, and there's no reason he should, because he's from the state of Washington," she said in an interview. "If he knew the facts, he would have told you FWS approved Wyoming's wolf management plan" in 2008 but was stymied by legal challenges.

Lummis said she is confident her language to prevent judicial review of a state management plan will survive its road through the Senate and reach the president's desk because a similar plan was passed in April to prevent groups from challenging a delisting of wolves in Montana and Idaho.

Democrats on the subcommittee railed against other riders designed to reduce opportunities for groups to challenge BLM grazing decisions and slammed the GOP's decision to not allow Interior to raise nearly $100 million in new oil and gas inspection fees, a decision Simpson said is best left to the authorizing committees.

"This is a political statement defining where this current Republican House majority stands on the environment," Moran said.

He questioned why Republicans would undermine the use of the ESA while at the same time imposing steep cuts on a program that helps states recover listed species and prevent others from needing federal protections.

"This is not so much a spending bill as a wish list for special interests," he said. "Oil companies, cattle grazers and miners, as well as those who pollute our air and foul our water, all have their special provisions tucked away in this bill."

EPA riders to take center stage

Democrats on the panel said they had expected the bill to make deep cuts to EPA's budget. What they were much less prepared for, they said, was the number and scope of legislative riders with which the bill would saddle EPA.

Moran said he was left "speechless" by the bill's prohibitions on Clean Air Act rules, Clean Water rules and other environmental safeguards.

One of the bill's highest-profile riders would place a one-year moratorium on Clean Air Act rules for carbon dioxide. Simpson said he was confident that the rider would have been added as an amendment to the bill in subcommittee even if he had not included it in the underlying bill.

"It was going to be offered, and it was going to pass," Simpson said. "That was just the reality."

He said greenhouse gas issues would receive plenty of debate in the full committee and on the floor of the House, because Democrats would offer amendments to strip it from the bill.

The subcommittee's bill also includes a rider that would block climate change lawsuits based on common law, such as the one that was rejected by the Supreme Court last month because EPA had already started to act.

The bill would also block EPA from using any money "to carry out, implement, administer, or enforce" any changes to Clean Water Act jurisdiction enacted after the most recent George W. Bush-era guidance.

Similarly, language would block expansion of EPA's stormwater discharge program in advance of anticipated rules to force improved cleanup of runoff at construction sites and elsewhere.

Still, Simpson said the bill did not contain as many curbs to EPA as his Republican colleagues had offered. "We turned away far more policy provisions than we included," he said.

Simpsons said most of the riders that were passed over for inclusion in the bill were on subjects that the Natural Resources or Energy and Commerce committees were already dealing with -- such as air toxics rules for boilers and utilities. The Energy and Commerce Committee is set to consider legislation to delay and limit EPA's so-called Utility MACT rule later this summer.

"Some things were just left out because the authorizing committees said that might screw up what we're trying to do in our committee," Simpson said.

Will the Senate agree?

Some of the amendments included in the spending bill were also in the House-passed fiscal 2011 stopgap spending bill but were jettisoned following negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate and the White House.

Republicans negotiated deep spending cuts as part of that measure (H.R. 1), but Democrats declared victory when all but a handful of legislative riders were left off the bill.

Simpson said he was uncertain which riders would survive this time around.

"I can't predict that," he said. "What I can do is what the House wants to do. And we'll pass it and then we'll conference it with the Senate."

Moran said he was not optimistic that Democrats could again keep most of the legislative riders from becoming law.

"My fear and my guess is that we're not going to be as successful in eliminating all of the riders this time around," he said. "The reason we were able to eliminate them was because we had some leverage in the highest levels of negotiations at the White House. We may not be in that position this time with the Interior approps bill."

He said Democrats might be in a slightly stronger position if Republicans fail to pass individual spending bills, as they plan to do, and instead fall back on an omnibus bill to fund several agencies, or use a continuing resolution to keep the government funded past Oct. 1 at current levels.

Even if most of the EPA riders do not become law, Moran said, Republicans will continue to raise the issue in future appropriations legislation.

"These issues are not going to go away, but neither can we acquiesce to wiping out what is in effect 40 years of environmental legislation in one appropriations bill," he said.

"These are defining issues between the Republican and Democratic Party, between people who want to protect the environment and those that want to exploit it," he added.

While riders took center stage in the markup, Democrats also voiced their displeasure with the cuts Simpson's draft made to many programs but especially to water infrastructure programs for states.

Dicks, who is the former chairman of the subcommittee, said the nearly $1 billion cut to the Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds would be felt in communities throughout the country when they apply for federal aid to complete water infrastructure projects.

He said there had been a backlog of applications for more than a decade, and the subcommittee's proposed cuts would only add to it. He noted that the United States had funded similar projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"If we're going to do nation-building, why aren't we going to do some of it in the United States?" Dicks asked.