Lawmakers aim to slash climate funds in two spending bills
House Republican appropriators Wednesday proposed deep cuts in many agriculture programs, eliminating the long-standing 'climate hubs' at the Agriculture Department and targeting resilience for natural disasters in military and veterans funding.
Annual spending legislation for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 would set discretionary spending at USDA and related agencies at $25.5 billion, which Republican appropriators said would reflect a 4.4 percent decline from this year's level.
While the proposal would hit certain areas especially hard — such as the climate hubs, conservation and urban agriculture — it would increase spending at the Agricultural Research Service and maintain funding to fight animal and plant pests and diseases at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
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The Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture is scheduled to mark up the bill Thursday. Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) said in a news release that the measure 'reflects a clear, conservative commitment to fiscal responsibility while ensuring that America's farmers, ranchers, and rural communities remain a top priority.'
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And in the meantime, she helped form a support group of about 80 wildlife protection conservationists who are in similar predicaments. People working on government contracts are hit especially hard because they are not eligible for the deferred resignation plans available to federal employees, and cannot look forward to their pensions. Todd Frank, of Westminster, Md., was given just a few minutes' notice before he was laid off as a technical writer on a contract with the Defense Department's science and technology directorate, helping get the appropriate gear out to military personnel in the field. Mr. Frank, 54, is now wrestling with whether to uproot his family to find a new job, which would come with steep trade-offs. His wife runs her own business — a licensed day care out of their home. His teenage sons do not want to leave their high school, he said. Lately, he is looking at the family's budget for where to make cuts. 'Not being able to buy a suit for prom sounds like rich people problems, but you don't want to turn around and tell your kid, 'You can't do this' or 'You can't do that,'' Mr. Frank said. Several states had advertised their eagerness to hire people laid off by the federal government in the early days of federal cuts. In March, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said the state would give hiring preference to former federal workers. Since then, the state government has received more than 7,300 applications from people who said they had federal experience, his office said, and so far, state agencies have hired 120 of them. But state jobs have gotten a lot more popular in recent months. Since March, former and current federal employees have sent in nearly 700 applications, California's human resources office said. Some states are having their own budget problems, in part brought on by uncertainty around the continuation of federal funding. Alaska, Massachusetts, Indiana, Louisiana and New Hampshire have implemented hiring freezes. Public health agencies in Ohio and Alaska have laid people off as grants were canceled. And a broad swath of universities have also paused new hires, including the University of California system, the University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University in Georgia. With the Trump administration's firings of scientists and grant cancellations from agencies including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, science and consulting have been hit especially hard, according to Indeed. Companies and nonprofits that helped evaluate whether federal programs were working, like American Institutes for Research, have let go up to a quarter of their payroll. Paro Sen, a research scientist in Cincinnati, was laid off in May along with most of the people in her office at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. She worked on industrial hygiene, studying worker exposures that cause chronic health problems, and visited Washington in May with her union to talk to members of Congress about the need to restore these jobs to the federal government. 'This was my dream job that I have been ripped from,' she said in an interview. Ms. Sen and her colleagues work in such a specialized field that they are competing for very few available jobs, especially if they want to stay where they are. 'The job market right now is not amazing,' said Ms. Sen, 29. 'Cincinnati is not a very big city, and you've got, suddenly, some of the smartest people in this field all applying and competing for the exact same jobs at the same time.'
