Improving Interagency Coordination for Pipeline Reviews Act
Floor Speech
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 3668. This bill is an outright assault on our Nation's environmental laws. It completely strips States of their ability to enforce clean water laws when it comes to pipelines.
I have to say, Mr. Speaker, that I was surprised when I first saw this provision in the bill. I thought Republicans were the party of States' rights, so surely they wouldn't take away a State's right to enforce their laws and have a voice in the pipeline siting process.
Democrats offered an amendment at our committee markup that would have struck this provision, and Republicans voted against it.
Here we are. Republicans are on the House floor pushing forward legislation that actively and intentionally sells out States' rights. Much like their promise to lower prices, I guess that was also just an empty campaign slogan.
Their bill goes even further than that. It also makes the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, responsible for enforcing the Clean Water Act for pipelines. Now, there is just one problem with that, and that is that FERC has no idea how to do that.
At an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in April, we heard from FERC that they do not currently have the staff expertise or resources to execute this bill properly.
This bill is also a bad solution in search of a nonexistent problem. FERC confirmed for us that they have not even seen issues with State clean water permits for pipelines. As usual, Republicans simply do not care about the facts.
The language surrounding the Clean Water Act is not the only defect with this bill. Despite claiming that the bill aims to improve interagency coordination for pipeline permits and authorizations, the bill actually discourages it by pitting agencies against each other.
Instead of letting FERC work collaboratively with other agencies, as the process does now, this bill makes FERC the adversary of other agencies by forcing it to breathe down every other agency's neck and make decisions on whether to exclude other agencies from the review process entirely. That is simply not an efficient or collaborative process, in my opinion.
I also want to take a moment to note that while Republicans are obsessed with destroying our public health and environmental laws in order to speed up the construction of more pipelines, they have failed to pass basic laws to ensure that those pipelines are safe.
The authorization for pipeline safety activities at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, expired about 2 years ago. At no point in the last 2 years have Republicans put a bill on the floor that would reauthorize pipeline safety activities. I guess they don't care about that either.
Instead, they have allowed the Trump administration to run roughshod over the very concept of safety, repealing numerous rules designed to protect our communities and workers, and even withdrawing the rule that was required by law that President Trump himself signed.
This bill, Mr. Speaker, and other energy bills we considered this week out of the Committee on Energy and Commerce are not a serious attempt at a permitting package. I know the Republicans keep saying that this is permitting reform. That is absolutely not true. They do absolutely nothing to make it easier to expand or improve our power grid, despite this being a time when our grid reliability is a growing threat.
For years, Democrats have been clear: A permitting package is impossible without reforms to the way we build transmission lines that transport electricity across the country. None of these bills addresses that either.
Instead, we have a slate of bills that cut corners for fossil fuel infrastructure, abolish States' rights to have a role in the pipeline process, and serve absolutely no one, except the worst corporate polluters, all while the Trump administration blocks and cancels new clean energy projects across the country.
Mr. Speaker, these bills basically double down on failed Republican energy policies that have already driven up energy bills on American families and pollution in just the 10 months since Trump took office.
The President promised to cut Americans' power bills in half. Instead, he and Republicans are causing them to soar with their backward policies and their war on cheaper clean energy.
Electricity prices are up 13 percent nationwide, and Trump calls the issue of affordability a hoax. That is how out of touch the President is, and the Republicans continue to blindly follow him down the path.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, let me say I have great respect for the sponsor of this bill, the gentleman from North Carolina, but I can't believe that he raised the issue of electricity prices in the context of this bill.
The bottom line is that electricity prices are up 13 percent nationwide just since President Trump took office--I already mentioned that--and natural gas prices are up 8 percent nationwide since a year ago, 14 percent in my home State of New Jersey, in part due to increased exports of liquefied natural gas. Both of these figures are vastly outpacing inflation, which is already sky high, thanks to the President's tariffs and the healthcare and housing crisis.
Let there be no mistake that Republicans and President Trump own this affordability crisis, and affordability isn't, as the President said, a Democratic scam. It is an issue that is impacting hundreds of millions of American families that, each week, are struggling to make ends meet.
Energy affordability is especially critical. Eighty million Americans are struggling to pay their utility bills. Republicans refuse to do anything about it, and this bill is only going to make it worse.
In fact, Mr. Speaker, the Republicans have made this whole situation with electricity prices so much worse. The big, ugly bill that they passed this summer will raise electricity prices by over 61 percent over the next decade, thanks to its attacks on clean energy. The President's pursuit of unlimited LNG exports would increase natural gas costs by over 50 percent, and that is on top of the thousands of dollars that the President's tariffs have already cost American families.
The Republicans have no plan to address the affordability crisis. American families are forced to pay the price, and this bill is only going to make it worse.
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Mr. PALLONE.
Mr. Speaker, I once again rise in strong opposition to this bill. I have to say that I keep hearing from my Republican colleagues about permitting reform. In fact, they have been calling this permitting week here in the House.
The reality is they are not interested in any kind of permitting reform unless it involves streamlining the ability to eliminate barriers for fossil fuels, for gas pipelines, for example.
They have no interest in dealing with permitting reform in general that, perhaps, would help bring clean sources of energy to the public. I would like to have more opportunities for clean energy and for renewables, and we can certainly work on permitting reform in that regard. However, the President doesn't want that. The President says that there shouldn't be any windmills, there shouldn't be any solar panels, and there shouldn't be any renewables at all. The only thing he wants to do is go back to fossil fuels: oil, gas, and coal.
When I hear about permitting reform on the other side, I kind of laugh. That is because we could be working together with Republicans on proposals that would lower the costs of energy and unleash domestic clean energy. Permitting reform, in an effort to eliminate barriers to clean energy, could be on the table, but they don't want to do that.
Instead of proposals to make things better, Republicans are offering bills that would discriminate against clean energy, would mandate old and expensive coal plants to stay online long past their retirement date, and this bill, which would strip States of their ability to enforce their clean water laws on gas pipelines.
Instead of doing what I would consider the hard work to find a bipartisan path forward, Republicans are simply giving up. I think this is incredibly damaging to the House as an institution. Republicans could have worked hand in hand with Democrats here and in the Senate, and we could have then all worked together to find a path forward. Instead, bullied into submission by President Trump and the MAGAs, Republicans are moving bills with no Democratic support, and they are cutting the House entirely out of any discussions with regard to any permitting reform. It is just a shame.
Instead of discussing this bill that essentially pollutes our waters, we should be discussing legislation that would make it easier to plan, permit, and pay for an expansion of the power grid. A lot of that could be based on clean energy. Instead of discussing this legislation, we should be discussing ways to reinstate the billions in grants and loans that were approved by Congress that the Trump administration illegally cut off during the Republican shutdown.
Instead of discussing this awful bill today, we could be discussing proposals to grant certainty to energy developers so the President can't just arbitrarily cancel a wind or a solar project just because he doesn't like the way it looks, which is what he says all the time.
There is a lot that we could be doing with regard to trying to bring more energy to market, including clean energy, but we are not doing those things. Instead, we are here discussing a partisan Republican bill that strips States of their rights and is going nowhere.
That is just the way it is, I guess. It is unbelievable.
Mr. Speaker, once again, I rise in strong opposition to this bill. I heard what the previous speaker said, and this rehashes the same thing that we discussed with some of the bills that were voted on yesterday, which is this notion that somehow fossil fuels are reliable and renewables are not.
There are reliability problems with every form of energy, but what we need to do is to say that we are going to do all of the above. In other words, we are not going to just say, as the Republicans want, we are only using fossil fuels: oil, gas, and coal. There are problems with reliability with those.
We need to have everything, all of the above. Republicans keep saying that they are for all of the above, but the President and Republicans continually say: No renewables, no wind, no solar, and other forms of renewables.
This idea that somehow one form of energy is more reliable than another is simply not the case.
However, that is not what I want to talk about as I close, Mr. Speaker. I want you to understand and my colleagues to understand how concerned I am about pipeline safety which, of course, they simply ignore.
I mentioned this earlier, but one of the things that really disturbs me about this bill is that Republicans are pushing to remove environmental safeguards for gas pipelines at the same time they are refusing to act on vitally important pipeline safety legislation.
Authorization for PHMSA, the pipeline safety statute that we have, expired over 2 years ago on September 30, 2023. Since then, Republicans haven't moved a single bill on pipeline safety to the floor of the House. They simply have not. It is certainly not because everything is going well with pipeline safety. DOGE devastated PHMSA's pipeline safety office in the Department of Energy.
Energy Transfer, a pipeline company and key ally of President Trump, is attempting to declare pipeline safety enforcement unconstitutional in the courts. This spring, pipeline safety enforcement actions dropped to a new low. It is just a disaster over at the Department of Energy. There is nobody doing anything about pipeline safety.
Democrats wondered if this was an oversight by Republicans. Surely they would want to ensure that pipelines are safe before making it easier to build more of them. Mr. Speaker, my colleague Ranking Member Castor filed an amendment to this bill that would have prohibited this bill from taking effect until Congress reauthorized the pipeline safety bill.
Unfortunately, Republicans blocked it from coming to the floor. Apparently, they are happy to talk about removing environmental protections for gas pipelines, but are still, I would think, ashamed to talk about how they are letting vital safety provisions expire.
Congress cannot guarantee the safety of pipelines if the folks who are supposed to be policing them are no longer on the beat. My point is that they keep talking about permitting reform, but they don't work with us on that. They keep saying that they want all kinds of energy, but they cut off any possibility of clean energy with renewables. Then they say that we don't need to have any kind of restrictions whatsoever or investigation to review when we site pipelines, but at the same time they gut and refuse to do anything about pipeline safety in general.
Again, Mr. Speaker, this bill is a threat to our safety, and it is a threat to the environment. I urge my colleagues to oppose it, and I yield back the balance of my time, Mr. Speaker.
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Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
The yeas and nays were ordered.
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