Government Spending

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I come to the floor today to introduce the Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2022. Of course, that is the fiscal year that began on October 1.

Like my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee, I am thrilled about the great work that has been done over many months to craft spending bills that lift up the ideals of our country and put the needs of workers and families ahead of the desires of special interests.

As chair of the Interior and Environment Subcommittee, I can say that this is certainly true for the Interior bill that Senator Murkowski and I, along with members of the subcommittee, have worked so hard to create.

And I want to especially thank Senator Murkowski and our fellow subcommittee members for their contributions to this bill.

The Interior bill raises some of the more complex and challenging issues facing America, so we are delighted that it has been filed today.

Together, we have crafted a bill that recognizes not only the danger that hotter, more devastating wildfires, longer fire seasons themselves pose, but the dangers of smoke from them. That smoke is making a bigger and bigger impact back home on our crops and on our entertainment because of outdoor venues being shut down and certainly upon people's health. The bill makes critical investments to lessen the peril.

It doubles the funding for hazardous fuels reductions. When you hear that term, you may not be sure what it means. What we are talking about is the buildup of fuels in the forest that make the wildfires so much worse. So it doubles the funding to take out those fuels to $360 million so the Forest Service can treat more of the highest risk acres of forest lands.

We particularly want to see a concentration of the wild land-urban interface so that the fires are slowed down and can be attacked more aggressively when they are close to our towns.

I will never forget the Labor Day fires of a year ago, where I drove 600 miles up and down our State and never got out of the smoke, and town after town after town was burned to the ground.

This is why we have to invest in reducing the fuels in our forest and making them more fire resilient.

The bill doubles the funding for the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program to $80 million instead of $40 million to help fund critical projects that will improve forest landscapes and add to the resiliency while also removing limitations on how many projects could be in each region each year.

You know, the thing about these landscape restoration programs, it brings together the stakeholders from the entire spectrum--from the timber companies, the environmental groups, the local elected officials, the Indian Tribes--to work out a prescription on how to treat the forest, and then that treatment stays out of the courts.

So it brings an end to the timber wars that have so often frustrated so many on all sides while thereby being successful in treating the forests, producing more saw logs for the mill, producing more jobs in the forests, more jobs in the log trucks. So it is a win for fire resiliency; it is a win for jobs; it is a win for our timber industry.

Funding in this bill goes a long way to transitioning to a larger, permanent forest fighting--firefighting force where firefighters risking their lives now get a minimum pay of at least $15 per hour. And that doesn't sound like very much, but it is an elevation from the minimum wages of the past.

And it provides $10 million to create a new EPA grant program to help States, Tribes, local governments, and others prepare for and protect against the hazards of wildfire smoke.

In recent years, whether it is the impact of air quality on those with breathing and health issues or the tourism industry or industries like our wineries and our vineyards, the smoke that can blanket Oregon from fires during fire season has been nearly as devastating as the fires themselves.

Our subcommittee has also crafted a bill that takes on the climate crisis with the seriousness it deserves while we are striving to preserve our lands and our natural wonders. There is no question the planet is getting warmer. Our oceans are getting more acidic as carbon dioxide is transformed into carbonic acid. That is having a big impact on our ecosystems on the Oregon coast. We are facing more extreme weather--droughts, storms, flooding, heat waves--but for too long, we haven't come anywhere close to doing enough to confront this crisis.

We are starting to make changes through the Interior appropriations bill. The bill makes major investments in EPA's climate and enforcement programs, including a 46-percent increase in the clean air and climate program to tackle the crisis, restore clean air capacity, and expand and modernize air quality monitoring. And it provides an extra $56 million for the Agency's enforcement and compliance efforts and over $40 million for the Climate Conservation Corps that will create jobs while jump-starting efforts to dramatically expand on-the-ground conservation work to address the impacts of climate change; conserve and restore public lands and public waters; bolster resilience, increase reforestation, protect biodiversity, and improve access to recreation.

There is also $73 million in new funding to the start the process of transitioning the Interior Department from fossil fuel vehicles to zero-emission vehicles. It is something that has to happen across our entire government.

Finally, we have worked together to craft a bill that makes unprecedented, long overdue investments in Tribal communities, in their health systems, their education systems, social services, water resources and infrastructure, and in law enforcement. For far too long, our Tribal communities haven't received the help or the investments that they deserve. In this bill, we are starting to right that wrong.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is getting a 15-percent increase in funding. The Indian Health Service is getting a 21-percent increase in funding. And for the first time, the Indian Health Service is getting an advance appropriations status. What that means is if the government shuts down, we don't shut down the health services for Native Americans. When that happened in the past, that was an egregious failure. You can't let that happen. This bill puts an end to that, creating peace of mind for everyone that the health service will be there when needed.

We are increasing the Bureau of Indian Education budget by 8 percent, the Native American and Alaska Natives housing programs by 18 percent. We certainly can't make up for centuries' worth of disastrous policy and chronic underfunding when it comes to Indian Country overnight, but I believe this bill and its unprecedented investments should begin to make a large stride toward fulfilling the government's treaty and trust responsibilities, showing Tribal communities that their needs are a priority.

There is a lot more in this bill. The Interior appropriations bill covers a lot of territory. But I wanted to come to the floor to share some of these highlights.

It is important that we get our funding bills for fiscal year 2022 to this floor, to the President's desk, and take all the expertise that has gone into these bills into action by bills that have passed and been implemented.

I want to provide a sense for all my colleagues that the real investments that these bills are making in our Nation are the kind of investments we need to make to ensure strong foundations for families, for our communities, and for our Nation to thrive in the years ahead.

I am grateful for the countless hours of hard work from the Members and, very importantly, from the staff who put these bills together, raising the salient issues, helping to communicate between the Republican side and the Democratic side and the House side and the Senate side and the expertise from the executive branch. The staff work that goes into a bill like this is enormous. So thank you to the staff teams on both the majority and minority side, without whom this bill would not exist.

On my team, we have Melissa Zimmerman, Ryan Hunt, Anthony Sedillo, and Martha Roberts. And on Ranking Member Murkowski's team, we have Emy Lesofski, Nona McCoy, and Lucas Agnew. To each and every one of them, thank you for your tireless efforts. And I must say that the Republican and Democratic team members worked so well together on complex and difficult issues involved in the Interior bill. So I salute them for forging that effort to have a very professional analysis and attitude as we work to solve the challenges facing America.

I look forward to joining with all my colleagues in the Chamber in passing this bill and the other appropriations bills that will put America on a path to a much better future.

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