Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services Relating to ``Patient Protection and Affordable Care

Floor Speech

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon to speak in strong support of the appropriations package that will soon be pending on the Senate floor. We overwhelmingly voted to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed last night, and so we are in a good place with these appropriations bills. As we were talking yesterday on the floor, we are appropriating again. This will be the second package of bills. As colleagues have noted in their statements before me, this package includes three bills for the rest of fiscal year 2026.

This is for Commerce, Justice, and Science; for Energy and Water Development; and for Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. And as chairman of the Interior and Environment Subcommittee, I am really pleased to be able to share with colleagues the good work that our subcommittee has produced. I am proud of the bill that we have in this package.

Ours is not an easy one to write. Within the Interior bill, we not only have management of our public lands, but we have oversight of the EPA, we have the arts, and we have the Indian health and Tribal programs. It is a challenge. It is complex. There are a lot of matters that reside under the Department of the Interior and the EPA. And, oftentimes, we don't always see eye to eye on the issues that are within this jurisdiction, and that certainly would extend to funding.

There are some years that the Interior bill has proven absolutely elusive, where we simply could not overcome our differences, and we couldn't complete our work. But, fortunately, that is not the case this year.

I worked closely with our full committee leadership, Chairman Collins and Ranking Member Murray, and I want to thank them for their leadership. They have kept us all to task, and their leadership--and I particularly commend my colleague from Maine, Senator Collins, for her just constant effort to keep us to task and really working so well with members of the committee.

I also want to recognize and thank my ranking member, Senator Merkley. He has been a partner to work with on this committee. Again, we don't always see eye to eye on the issues, and one wouldn't expect us to. But we are able to work through those areas.

And I also want to acknowledge and thank the other colleagues on the committee, as well as our counterparts in the House. I think we built a good bipartisan bill, and I think that the support that we have seen by way of the votes is proof positive of that.

We had a 26-to-2 vote in committee last summer, and then, after weeks of bicameral negotiation, our colleagues in the House passed this minibus last week by a resounding vote of 397 to 28--so pretty strong; actually pretty powerful. And then, to have received the endorsement from the President with his statement of position endorsing this three- package bill was also very much appreciated.

And, as I say, I absolutely appreciate the work that went into the CJS and the Energy and Water bills. I certainly support them.

But, this afternoon, I want to direct my comments to the Interior bill, as we begin the debate.

Overall, we prioritized fiscal responsibility, cutting a total of $1.9 billion. This is about 4.7 percent of our bill. That is substantive. And while we met that goal to cut our spending, we also met the needs and met Members' requests across its many accounts.

We also reformatted. As we updated our priorities for this fiscal year, reflecting a new administration and the majorities here in Congress, I think that we restored balance in some of the key areas of our bill. And the result is we have a measure that will strengthen our energy security, our mineral security, and our national security.

It will continue to facilitate clean and safe drinking water. This is a priority that so many of our colleagues have emphasized.

It will protect our public lands, and it will ensure that we are as ready as we can be for the upcoming fire season.

For example, we provide funding so that Agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, have greater capacity to issue permits for energy projects. We have included robust funding from mapping and minerals- related work at the USGS.

We have also provided funds to bolster development and staffing out in our U.S. Territories. They are a long way away, most in the Pacific. They are very crucial, very key, but, oftentimes, they are overlooked or are possibly ignored. And so making sure that we have got the critical staffing that we need out there and the folks to make sure that we are poised in our quest to counter China.

But I mentioned the cuts that we had made to this bill. Even as we cut back, we were able to do some important work when it comes to the priorities, like fully funding wildland fire management.

We prioritized the removal of hazardous fuels. We took care of the firefighters who risk their lives to protect their communities, property, and the environment. As we have seen, year over year, that threat of fire from one end of the country to another is very real. So the effort here is a very important one.

We continued to address the threats that are posed by natural hazards, like volcanoes--we just saw another eruption in Hawaii-- earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis. My State has been particularly hard hit in recent years with deadly landslides.

But there are other natural hazards that threaten lives and landscapes, and we worked to address them in this bill.

When it comes to the Payments in Lieu of Taxes Program, or PILT, we fully funded it. This accounts for the Federal lands that reduce the tax base of counties and boroughs across the country.

We also included substantial resources for our Agencies to manage and maintain our national parks. We hear from so many who love and embrace our national parks. We all love them. Sometimes, we love them so much that we forget that their care and their upkeep is also important. So we made sure we addressed the resources for our national parks, our wildlife refuges, and, really, all of our Federal lands.

One area of the bill that perhaps gets a little more parochial--but, obviously, an issue of very real concern--is a focus on invasive species.

We don't happen to have Asian carp in Alaska. We want to keep it that way. I know that, in many parts of the South, Asian carp is a threat, an invasive species that needs to be dealt with.

Up on the west coast, in Washington State and, now, unfortunately, in Alaska, we are seeing growing threats from this European green crab. We want to be able to knock those out.

There is the spruce budworm that threatens landscapes everywhere, from Florida to Maine, to Washington, to Alaska.

Whether it is green crab, Asian carp, or budworms, the reality is we are impacted in different ways. So being able to direct resources to push back on these invasive species is important.

We also upheld our commitment to Native peoples. We have provided robust funding for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for the Indian Health Service, and for similar Agencies.

I think we did really good work within the bill to advance some of the public safety and justice initiatives. We strengthened Tribal colleges and universities. We addressed the scourge of missing and murdered indigenous women and children. A focus on ensuring the safety of our Native peoples was a priority--but, really, not just the justice and safety, but so many of the other aspects of the well-being of Native people around the country.

As it relates to the EPA, I think, again, we have a good story to tell here. We did scale back the overall budget, but we kept the priorities in the right place. We fully funded the Clean Water and the Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Funds. That is a priority across the country.

We provided robust funding for EPA's efforts in science and technology, in environmental programs and management, with Superfund issues, and, especially, for State and Tribal assistance grant programs.

Overall, we addressed the priorities of dozens of Members of the Senate, whether it was programmatic requests for more parochial matters, like stream gages on the Ohio River, to the distribution of revenues from development off the gulf coast.

We did instruct Agencies not to undertake certain activities that would waste taxpayer dollars and impose burdens, like the regulation of lead tackle and greenhouse gas reporting requirements for farmers and livestock producers.

We also provided funds for America250. I mentioned that the Interior Subcommittee has oversight of the arts, whether it is the national humanities or an element of the arts. In our account, we also provided funds for America250. We recognize the importance of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of our Nation. We want this to be an anniversary that really brings us together, that celebrates the best of our Nation and reminds us that we are just so blessed to be Americans.

I have spoken about so many of the broad national impacts of this bill, but for folks back home that may be listening: OK, what about Alaska? No surprise, Alaska is always first and foremost for me, and we paid attention to Alaska within this bill. In addition to the many things I have mentioned, from wildfire to natural hazards, to PILT, we were able to provide for the restoration of vital fish habitat. We were able to scrounge up some funding for my colleague from Alaska's Save Our Seas Act. This is very important legislation for us.

We also added funds for the cleanup of contaminated lands, for airshed grants that will improve air quality in places like Fairbanks, for healthcare facilities and staffing in Native communities, and to begin to address the impending crisis of leaking above-ground fuel storage tanks. This is a matter for so many of our communities that rely for their power generation from just fuel that is brought upriver by barge. You have to have a place to store it. These storage tanks have been there for decades and need to be attended to.

We also recognize that there is a staggering backlog in BIA's probate courts. This needs to be addressed, and we were able to make some incremental gains in that area as well.

So there are many good provisions in the bill that add up to what I think is a good bill. It is certainly not everything that I wanted. They never are. I wish--I wish--we could have reached bicameral agreement to include some of the naming conventions that we were batting back and forth. We were not able to, in this bill, call Denali by its rightful name. This is North America's largest peak. ``Denali,'' in the Koyukon-Athabascan language, means ``the great one,'' and that is absolutely, positively, 100-percent fitting for this magnificent mountain. We are going to live to fight another day on that because nobody is going to take that mountain from us. I am certainly not standing down here.

For today, I would urge the Senate to recognize the important bipartisan work that we have done with balance, with common sense, and with fiscal restraint as really our guiding principles here. I don't take for granted anything in this Interior bill. But we would not be at this place today without the members not only on my team but on Senator Merkley's team, and the broader Interior Appropriations staff. They have worked extraordinarily hard and extraordinarily well together.

I want to thank the members of my team, led by Daniel Mencher, Sarah Jorgenson, and Anna Smith; and their counterparts on the minority side, Melissa Zimmerman, Ryan Hunt, Rishi Sahgal, and Anthony Sedillo. These folks worked day and night, around the clock, through Christmas, through New Year's, and they have produced a very, very strong bill.

We overcame some long odds--again, some really long nights--to move this forward and to fund the Department of the Interior, the Forest Service, EPA, and related Agencies. But what we agreed to is going to help our people, our communities, our economy, our security, and our lands and our wildlife. It is something we should all be proud to support.

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