Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Senate’s top Republican EPA appropriator, rejected steep budget cuts to the agency sought by the Trump administration, again signaling on Wednesday that the agency is in for a spending haircut rather than a halving.
The resistance from the Alaska Republican follows a warning last month from top House EPA appropriator Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) that EPA will not be seeing “steep cuts” to its budget.
During a hearing with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Murkowski said that “there’s good and bad within” the budget proposal for the agency, noting it would “target inefficiencies, overlap and waste at the agency.”
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But the steep cuts to certain programs are untenable, she concluded.
