Reducing and Eliminating Duplicative Environmental Regulations Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TONKO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for yielding. It is worth reiterating just how effective the Clean Air Act has been at protecting our public health.

In the past 50-plus years, the Clean Air Act has proven time and time again that environmental protections and economic growth can, indeed, go hand in hand.

Between 1970 and 2022, major air pollutants dropped by 78 percent, while the U.S. gross domestic product nearly quadrupled. However, despite this progress, there is still much more work to do to ensure that all Americans can breathe healthy air.

More than 156 million Americans are living in places with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, and that air pollution is associated with over 100,000 premature deaths in the United States each and every year. I find it disheartening that the majority continues to advance bills that would make the Clean Air Act less effective at protecting people from dangerous pollution.

The RED Tape Act is the latest Republican effort to claim that the rules are too burdensome on industry. This bill amends section 309 of the Clean Air Act to eliminate the requirement for EPA to review and provide written comments on major Federal construction projects and actions in accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act.

This could allow major Federal projects and actions to be approved without proper consideration of their impacts on air quality and public health.

The bill also removes the ability for the public to be informed of potential public health concerns stemming from these projects.

I really do not think Americans are opposed to the Federal Government considering the potential health, economic, and environmental impacts of major decisions before they are made. Yet, this bill would limit that consideration while making it harder for the public to understand the consequences of major projects.

I know some Members will claim this review is duplicative of NEPA, but many of these same Members are also pushing parallel efforts to gut NEPA, claiming that NEPA isn't necessary because our underlying environmental laws will sufficiently protect public health and the environment.

You can have it both ways. You cannot end both parts of a supposedly duplicative process unless the goal of this effort is to severely limit environmental reviews of projects entirely. That is not about cutting red tape. That is about ending decades-old public health protections so that industry doesn't need to worry about how pollution mitigation might cut into their profits.

The bottom line is that the EPA is our Nation's foremost expert at assessing projects' impacts on air quality and is responsible for protecting the air that we breathe and the water that we drink. I cannot support efforts to undermine EPA's expertise and eliminate the agency's efforts to carry out reasonable environmental reviews, and so I encourage my colleagues to join me in opposing this legislation.

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