An alliance of several of the nation’s leading environmental and conservation organizations charged Wednesday that, when viewed as a whole, President Bush’s 2006 budget makes cuts far deeper than those he proposed specifically for the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency.
In short, the groups said the budget stands as “the most anti-environment budget blueprint ever proposed by his administration.”
EPA’s proposed spending was trimmed by about 6 percent and Interior’s was cut by slightly less than 1 percent, according to administration figures. But the advocates said the decrease would total more than 10 percent when cuts in environment-oriented programs scattered throughout other governmental agencies, including those for energy conservation, Amtrak subsidies, coastal protection and wildlife habitat restoration, are taken into account.
“The administration’s budget demonstrates a stunning and irresponsible disregard for environmental safeguards,” Wesley Warren, deputy director of the National Resources Defense Council, said at the environmental alliance’s news conference. By comparison, he said, “Total domestic spending would be nicked by less than 1 percent.”
The groups’ charges sparked a war of words and statistics with administration officials.
Within hours, the EPA, the Interior and Agriculture Departments, and the U.S. Forest Service held a counterpresentation, arguing that the Bush administration has increased spending for key environmental needs, such as wetland and habitat conservation, and particularly for voluntary cooperative programs with farmers, ranchers, commercial interests, Indian tribes, and state and local governments.
The federal officials cited a proposed increase of $75 million, or 24.6 percent, for a series of cooperative conservation grant and partnership programs administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service.
“From his first day in office, the president has made it clear that he believes the best thing we can do for conservation is to tap into the energy, ingenuity and love for the land of the American people,” said Interior Secretary Gale Norton. “This budget reaffirms the president’s commitment to cooperative conservation.”
Environmental issues have received relatively little attention since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but as Bush’s second term begins, a fight is brewing over the administration’s air pollution control proposals.
According to Warren and representatives of Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and other allied organizations, Bush’s budget would reduce environmental and conservation spending from $31.3 billion to $28 billion. About $700 million would be cut from EPA clean-water projects, they said, while spending on the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund–a grant program used to create and preserve parks, forests, wildlife refuges and open spaces–would amount to $132 million instead of the $900 million Bush promised during his re-election campaign.
Assistant Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett said the Land and Water Conservation Fund was found to lack “clear performance grades or clear focus” and “duplicated state and local open space efforts.”
The environmentalists detailed cuts of 3 percent in National Park Service spending, 2 percent in U.S. Fish and Wildlife allocations and 4 percent in spending for the U.S. Forest Service.
The environmental advocates said that while two national commissions have called for immediate action to save the world’s oceans from pollution, overfishing and loss of coral barrier reefs, the administration is suggesting a reduction in spending for those concerns.
