A House bill to fund U.S. EPA and the Interior Department will come to the floor this afternoon under the shadow of an effort by lawmakers to forestall a default on the national debt by raising the federal debt limit.

Democratic lawmakers told reporters this morning that they hoped the spending bill would not be eclipsed by the debt debate, because it would greatly restrict the ability of EPA and Interior to protect air and water quality and wildlife habitat.

"We are trying to make the case both here and on the floor about how bad this bill is to get the attention of our colleagues over in the Senate and in the White House," said Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), the ranking member on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, said that while the bill has been put on the back burner while lawmakers and the media focus on the debt ceiling issue, "it is boiling over" with threats to the environment.

"If future generations judge the job we've done on this bill, it will be a very harsh judgment," Moran said.

The Interior and Environment spending bill would provide EPA with $7.1 billion for fiscal 2012, about $1.5 billion below this year's spending levels and $1.8 billion less than President Obama requested.

Interior would receive $9.9 billion, which is $720 million below the agency's current budget and $1.2 billion below the president's request.

The bill contains 40 pages of prohibitions on spending for rules and other activities, and Republican lawmakers are expected to add to them through amendments on the floor this week.

As written, the bill would prevent EPA from writing or implementing greenhouse gas rules for stationary sources in fiscal 2012 and from working on tailpipe emissions regulations that would take effect after model year 2016.

The measure would also bar the agency from moving ahead with new rules for air toxics and smog- and soot-forming emissions until the end of the fiscal year.

It would head off some of Interior's plans as well, with riders that would bar the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from listing any new species under the Endangered Species Act and prevent the Bureau of Land Management from implementing its proposal to withdraw roughly 1 million acres of lands surrounding the Grand Canyon from future mining.

Dicks said he would reprise an amendment he offered in committee to strip the ESA provision from the bill and hoped it would garner enough bipartisan support to clear the House. He was also hopeful that bipartisan efforts to strip the Grand Canyon provision would be successful.

"We think we have a chance on some of these amendments to get Republican support, and we will be working on that today as we prepare for floor action," he said.

Moran said he expected the New York state delegation to work to strip a provision from the bill that would prevent states from losing EPA funding if they impose strict ballast water standards for ships aimed at preventing the spread of invasive species such as the Asian carp.

Democrats said that while they hope the Senate and the White House keep the House rider provisions from becoming law, they are not taking that for granted.

"I'd like to say the bill would be dead on arrival in the Senate," Moran said. "The problem is, you can't assume that."

He noted that there are Senate Democrats, such as West Virginia Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Joe Manchin, who have consistently supported a temporary stay on EPA greenhouse gas authority. There is also bipartisan Senate support for curbs on some conventional pollution rules, mountaintop mining rules and other provisions.

The final spending bill is likely to also be negotiated this fall in the context of another government shutdown, he said.

"We don't want these provisions to be negotiating leverage in order to keep the government funded," he added.

Interest groups also ramped up their rhetoric in advance of this week's floor action on the Interior bill.

A coalition of conservation, recreation, business, and hunting and fishing groups this morning circulated a poll taken last week that showed public support for more funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which would see an 80 percent cut under the House bill.

The poll showed that 85 percent of respondents supported full funding for the program.