Latest news with #Pingree
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Rep. Pingree decries cuts to Planned Parenthood, Medicaid
May 28—Rep. Chellie Pingree on Wednesday slammed the House Republicans' budget bill for targeting Planned Parenthood's federal funding and for the bill's overall health cutbacks to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. "If this bill passes, you would be seeing a massive loss in access to health care," Pingree, D-1st District, said during a roundtable discussion she hosted at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England offices in Portland. Nicole Clegg, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England — which provides abortion care, reproductive health care and other primary care services — said the nonprofit would stand to lose about $5.2 million in federal funding if the current version of the bill is signed into law. That represents about half of the annual revenue for the nonprofit, which serves Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. "Everything is on the table," Clegg said when asked if clinics and service lines could shut down. "That is a tragedy." Planned Parenthood operates clinics in Portland, Biddeford, Topsham and Sanford. Clegg said the bill is "about targeting states where abortion is legal and making it impossible to access." Federal funding does not pay for abortions, but Planned Parenthood receives federal dollars for its other health care services, including through Medicaid. Maine Family Planning, the state's other abortion provider, is not specifically targeted in the bill the way Planned Parenthood is, but it would be affected by the health care cutbacks in the bill. Besides Planned Parenthood clinics across the country being under threat, the House bill would also result in about 14 million Americans becoming uninsured, including a projected 38,000 people in Maine. The increase in the uninsured rate and other cutbacks to to health care will result in rural hospitals closing, a sicker population and insurance rates increasing, Pingree said. Republicans who voted in favor of the bill argue that it's rooting out "waste, fraud and abuse" in Medicaid, and that government is bloated and needs to be cut. "We're not doing any cutting of anything meaningful," President Donald Trump told reporters after the bill passed the House. The bill has yet to be taken up in the Senate, where Republicans hold a four-seat majority. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has said she's against Medicaid cutbacks, but has also said she would be willing to consider "reasonable" work requirements. The House bill would result in people losing Medicaid coverage if they fail to meet work requirements or incorrectly filling out paperwork. Pingree said the work requirement provisions are effectively cutting Medicaid because the bureaucracy surrounding filling out the forms and meeting the paperwork requirements will result in people losing coverage. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 13.7 million Americans will lose their health insurance if the current version of the bill passes. According to KFF, a health policy think tank, about 75% of current Medicaid recipients work or are students, with most of the remaining 25% not working because they are disabled or retired. The bill would also cut health care by reducing Affordable Care Act subsidies that make ACA insurance premiums less costly. While Collins and a few other Republican moderates, such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, may be pushing scale back Medicaid cutbacks, some conservatives in the Senate are saying the bill doesn't go far enough and are pushing for larger cuts. Meredith Ruxton McIntosh, 55, of Hallowell, who was part of the roundtable discussion, said the cuts to Planned Parenthood need to be reversed. McIntosh, a U.S. Air Force veteran, said when she was young she got counseling, primary car and other help from Planned Parenthood, and she was able to lead a productive life because of the help she received. "Without the medical care and counseling that I was able to access through Planned Parenthood I would have likely dropped out of high school, never joined the military, never attended college or trade school and most certainly would have indulged in addictive substances to the detriment of my life," she said. Copy the Story Link
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Citing Maine Morning Star reporting, Pingree presses EPA on PFAS grant terminations
Rep. Chellie Pingree outside the U.S. Capitol. (Rep. Chellie Pingree via Facebook) Citing Maine Morning Star's reporting, Democratic U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine pressed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on conflicting statements about why it cut grants for forever chemical research in Maine. Earlier this month, the EPA terminated all of the grants it had awarded for research into reducing per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS, in the food supply, including to three Maine-based teams led by the Mi'kmaq Nation, Passamaquoddy Tribe and the University of Maine. The three grants for Maine projects amounted to almost $5 million. The termination notices read, 'The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.' In a statement to Maine Morning Star, the EPA Press Office equated the grants to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measures. However, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin publicly stated the grants were important and already congressionally appropriated when questioned by Pingree. Overall, the agency has highlighted combating PFAS contamination as a priority in recent weeks. Despite saying PFAS contamination is a priority, EPA cut millions in funding for research in Maine In a letter to Zeldin on Thursday, Pingree requested he address these inconsistencies and clarify EPA priorities by May 30. 'Do you and the EPA consider tribes – which are sovereign governments to which we have trust and treaty responsibilities – 'DEI?' If so, under what basis do you make that claim?' one of Pingree's questions to Zeldin in the letter reads. When asked why the grants no longer aligned with agency priorities, the EPA Press Office sent a statement on May 16 to Maine Morning Star, which read:, 'As with any change in administration, the EPA has been reviewing all of its grant programs and awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with administration priorities. Maybe the Biden-Harris administration shouldn't have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and 'environmental justice' preferencing on the EPA's core mission of protecting human health and the environment treating tribes and Alaska Natives as such.' Pingree and several of the researchers pushed back on this response, pointing out that the research objectives do not involve DEI or environmental justice and are about protecting public health. PFAS have been linked to long term adverse health outcomes, such as cancers and weakened immune systems, and their pervasiveness in agriculture is not fully understood. The statement is also directly at odds with the response Zeldin gave to Pingree about the grant terminations during an Appropriations subcommittee hearing on May 15. After Zeldin told the subcommittee that addressing PFAS contamination is a priority for the agency and him personally, Pingree asked, 'Since these grants are consistent with the EPA priorities, do you know why they were terminated?' Zeldin responded, 'It's an important program. It's something that's congressionally appropriated. The agency's going through a reorg, so the way that the program and these grants are administered are going to be different going forward. But these are important grants. I look forward to working with you, and your team as we're able to continue that good work going forward.' In light of these conflicting responses, Pingree asked Zeldin in her letter to confirm that addressing PFAS is a priority for the agency. 'If PFAS is a priority, which I believe you have stated many times, please provide more information about why the above listed grants were terminated,' the letter reads. 'They are not 'DEI' grants and they meet a key priority of the Agency so I would like some clarity as to the exact reasoning for these grant terminations.' The grantees have 30 days from their termination notices to make the case that their work is in compliance with the EPA's priorities. The team headed by the Mi'kmaq Nation filed its appeal on Wednesday. If the agency determines the grants are in line with agency priorities, Pingree also requested information on how and when the awards will be reinstated. Referring to the agency's work as a whole, Pingree additionally pressed Zeldin about the agency's plans for PFAS research beyond these grants. 'Without grants that fund research and scientific advancement for PFAS remediation, how will the EPA make determinations about effective remediation for PFAS in agriculture, water systems, and contaminated lands?' she wrote in the letter. Read more about the grants here. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Amid rumors of gubernatorial bid, Hannah Pingree to leave Mills administration
Hannah Pingree (left) and Gov. Janet Mills (right) participate in a round table at Colony Beach in Kennebunkport, Maine on May 2, 2025. (Photo via Office of Gov. Janet Mills) Hannah Pingree, who has led efforts on climate and housing policy for the state, will leave her position Friday. 'I'm so grateful to Governor Mills for the tremendous opportunity she gave me to dive into Maine's biggest challenges and lead work across her administration to chart a path to solutions,' Pingree said in a news release from the governor's office Thursday. Though the release didn't specify what Pingree plans to do next, she said she will 'remain relentlessly focused on the future of the state we all love.' The Bangor Daily News has reported that Pingree is expected to throw her hat in the ring for the Democratic gubernatorial primary next year. Prior to her time in the executive branch, Pingree served four terms in the Maine Legislature including two years as speaker of the state House of Representatives. She is also the daughter of Maine's 1st Congressional District representative. Pingree has served as director of the Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, also known as GOPIF, since 2019. The agency was created by Gov. Janet Mills to recommend policy solutions for some of the state's biggest issues and focuses on climate change, housing, workforce development, the opioid crisis and more. Mills said in the release that she asked Pingree to lead the office because she knew she had the ability to bring people together and develop innovative solutions based on her background in local and state government. Under Pingree's leadership, GOPIF helped advance legislation that created the Maine Climate Council to support the state in meeting its greenhouse gas emission reduction goals while investing in local infrastructure. Pingree served as co-chair of the council, which also created the state's climate action plan that outlines strategies for electrifying transportation and home heating, among other initiatives. Pingree's office has worked to expand housing options in the state amid a shortage of thousands of units. The agency designed programs such as the Rural Affordable Rental Housing Program and the Affordable Homeownership Program, which have helped create hundreds of new single-family homes and rental units. 'She and her team at GOPIF have exceeded my expectations at every step, and I look forward to watching her do great things for Maine in the years to come,' Mills said of Pingree. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Lawmakers unveil sweeping proposal that could transform farming nationwide: 'These goals are ambitious … but they're achievable'
Federal lawmakers have resurfaced legislation designed to help the United States' agricultural sector reach carbon neutrality by 2040. Commemorating Earth Day, U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine and Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico reintroduced the Agriculture Resilience Act. Endorsed by groups such as American Farmland Trust and the World Wildlife Fund, the bill focuses on six areas that supporters say would make farming more sustainable. "These goals are ambitious — but they're achievable," Pingree said in a statement. "By helping farmers adopt practices that boost resilience and profitability, this bill charts a path to not only create a more sustainable future for America's agriculture sector, but ensure greater economic viability for our farmers as well." The bill's six focus areas include goals like increasing research, protecting farmland, improving soil health, supporting methane management strategies, boosting renewable energy investments, and reducing food waste. "We need to provide our farmers and ranchers with new tools to not only protect their land and way of life, but also be part of the climate solution," Heinrich said. Based on 2022 data, agriculture is responsible for about 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Most of that comes from soil management tasks, such as applying fertilizer and irrigation practices. Another big culprit is methane produced by livestock, particularly cattle. Pingree, a former organic farmer, has previously championed other eco-friendly practices. Last year, as head of the Congressional Slow Fashion Caucus, she urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support the production and processing of sustainable fibers, hoping to replace the environmentally damaging synthetic fibers typically used in fast fashion. Heinrich, meanwhile, was involved in drafting the Inflation Reduction Act, of which he was also a staunch advocate. The act, which became effective in 2022, was written to include over $369 billion in climate provisions. Those included rebates and tax credits for people who implement green upgrades in their homes as well as in their garages by making the switch to an electric vehicle. Pingree previously introduced the ARA in 2020, and the duo first reintroduced it together in 2023. In 2025, the legislation comes onto the scene in a new context, with farmers across the country sharing that federal spending freezes over the last few months have thrown some of their conservation projects into question. Which of these factors is the biggest obstacle preventing you from getting solar panels? The upfront cost The way they look Not sure where to start No concerns here! Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Taking Recycling Rules to the Next (Federal) Level
Chellie Pingree cannot imagine throwing perfectly good clothing away. The idea, in fact, is practically anathema to her. 'I come from the state of Maine; I represent Maine,' the Democratic congresswoman said. 'We're a very thrifty, Yankee kind of culture that loves nothing more than buying clothes in a thrift shop, passing down a good wool shirt to a family member or, you know, having your boots resoled. It's second nature to me.' More from Sourcing Journal The Mirum Moto Jacket is the Fruit of Another Tomorrow's Graveyard Diligence How Fashion for Good is Addressing Apparel's Post-Production Impact EuRIC Textiles Publishes Circularity Manifesto Little could prepare her, even as ranking member of the House Appropriations Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee, for the knowledge of how much textile waste—from apparel, yes, but also footwear, carpets and household linens—gets landfilled or incinerated in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the amount of textile waste generated by the nation nearly doubled from 9.5 million tons in 2000 to 17 million tons in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. Of that, only 14.7 percent was recycled. When Pingree began pitching the idea of a Congressional Slow Fashion Caucus to tackle the onslaught of cheap and low-quality clothing she blames for the trend, her fellow lawmakers initially balked. Still, she kept at it, filling the ranks of what is now a growing coalition. 'People were like, 'Sorry, I don't care about clothes,'' she said. 'But the more I described to both male and female members the volume of clothing we're throwing out, the impact of foreign manufacturing and the impact on the environment, I found that it's a topic that interested people more than they realized. Our government doesn't really have a very good organizational structure for measuring the amount of waste and doing something about it. But it's not to say that we shouldn't.' That the U.S. government needs to take a heavier hand in tackling the scourge of textile waste is why Pingree led a request to the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to produce what ended up being hailed as the first federal report on fast-fashion pollution in December. The agency put its findings, titled 'Textile Waste: Federal Entities Should Collaborate on Reduction and Recycling Efforts,' in less sound-bitey terms, but the sentiment still held. The increasing dominance of fast fashion's high-turnover use-and-dispose business model, GAO said, has ramped up the production of clothing waste. But so has the dearth of centralized systems for collecting, sorting and grading discarded textiles for recycling or to retain their value on the secondhand market. 'It's not only that more textiles are being produced but also that these are fabrics that aren't necessarily of the highest quality, so they're usually not going to be recycled,' said Alfredo Gomez, director at GAO. 'Or they may have synthetic fibers, which also have difficulty, as we learned, in the recycling process.' The problem is figuring out who's responsible. While that's a perennial issue whenever there are multiple actors in a value chain, the United States is an expansive and fragmented nation governed by a patchwork of federal, regional and local policies. Textiles that are chucked into household trash enter the municipal waste stream, leaving cities and counties to ultimately decide what gets picked up at the curb for processing or recycling. But state leadership also has its say, with Massachusetts banning textiles from disposal or incineration in 2022, California requiring apparel and textile producers to fund and implement a statewide program to reuse, repair and recycle their products by 2026 and both New York and Washington cueing up similar moves of their own. 'Traditionally, waste is managed at the local level, so cities and counties and local government are the ones contracting with the haulers and getting the materials out of people's homes,' said Joanne Brasch, director of policy and outreach at the California Product Stewardship Council, a nonprofit that focuses on extended producer responsibility, better known by the acronym EPR. 'And it gets elevated to the state level when the product is problematic or big enough of a volume that the local government can't figure it out on their own. And that's kind of what happened to textiles. It was just too complicated.' Brasch would argue that a state approach is preferable because it allows for more transparency and enforcement. At the same time, federal entities are responsible not only for defining national strategies but also for funding research, conducting education and outreach and deploying grants to states, municipalities and other downstream stakeholders. The EPA, for instance, finalized in 2021 a plan to achieve a 50 percent nationwide recycling rate, including for textiles, by leveraging a bipartisan infrastructure deal that earmarked $350 million for solid waste and recycling grants. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, under the Department of Commerce, developed reference data to help textile sorters who use near-infrared spectroscopy to sort castoff clothing. And the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, as part of the Department of Energy, funds the Reducing Embodied-energy And Decreasing Emissions manufacturing institute—REMADE for short—and its efforts to bolster textile circularity. Even so, federal efforts involving textile waste tend to be implemented in isolation, with varying approaches and limited interagency collaboration, the GAO report said. Or, as Gomez put it, 'there's no one in charge.' There's also the fact that information on possible federal funding sources for advancing textile recycling for other stakeholders, including municipalities and nonprofit organizations, is rarely readily accessible. GAO proposed that the six federal entities it looked at—the EPA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of State and the Department of Energy—coordinate on their work through an interagency mechanism that 'follows leading practices,' perhaps at the behest and direction of Congress to 'take federal action.' While the organizations agreed with GAO's findings, they also pushed back at its recommendation to 'form an interagency coordinating group,' which Gomez said wasn't what the report had suggested, since the 'mechanism' could take the form of memorandums of understanding, working groups or charters. 'So that's what we call a partial disagreement,' he said. 'Moving forward, we will be tracking their actions and then updating them on our website. Sometimes Congress holds agencies accountable by holding hearings or wanting to know if the agencies have implemented GAO's recommendations. But we've issued the report to the people that asked for it, so it's now in their hands.' While states and municipalities can take initial steps to wrestle with the problem of textile waste, any long-term success will be limited without a cohesive federal mandate that pairs harmonized regulation with large-scale incentives, said Rachel Kibbe, CEO of American Circular Textiles, an industry lobbying group that includes reuse, resale and recycling stalwarts such as Circ, ThredUp, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective and USAgain. 'The fragmented approach we've seen with plastics has demonstrated that state-level policies often struggle to scale effectively, leading to inconsistent enforcement, compliance challenges, consumer confusion and limited infrastructure investment,' she said. 'This is especially true because we see EPR bills starting with our largest economies in the U.S. We are embarking on collecting massive amounts of textiles that we neither have the infrastructure nor the markets to handle yet.' ACT was behind a provision in the 2024 bill known as the Americas Trade and Investment Act, a.k.a. the Americas Act, that would appropriate more than $14 billion in grants, loans and credits to foster domestic textile circular innovation and development. It's the first-time textile circularity has been considered at this kind of scale, Kibbe said. Tying it with onshoring and nearshoring efforts also taps into the second Trump administration's 'America First' agenda, making it less a matter for partisan debate. She also supports bills that she wasn't directly involved in, such as the Strategies to Eliminate Waste and Accelerate Recycling Development, or STEWARD, which was introduced in the Senate in February and seeks to improve recycling capabilities across various materials, including textiles. Passing this would shore up the nation's recycling and composting infrastructure in rural and underserved areas and allow greater accessibility and transparency of waste management data. 'Efforts like California's SB 707 and other state efforts are important catalysts, but to drive systemic change, we need federal leadership that aligns policies, streamlines regulations and funds scaleable solutions,' she said. 'This includes incentives for circular design, recycling infrastructure and reshoring textile manufacturing, which will not only address waste but also support economic growth and supply chain resilience.' For Michelle Gabriel, director of the master's program in sustainable fashion at IE College New York, textile waste is both an issue of responsibility and of infrastructure. Gabriel was a member of a task force that examined how New York City could reduce the environmental impact of the textile-based goods it purchased, used and disposed of based on Local Law 112, which went into effect in 2022. The law, as far as Gabriel and her team could tell, is the first of its kind within the United States. In a report published in August, they argued that it should be viewed as an 'important foundational step' to advancing textile sustainability and procurement efforts by the city and the broader textile industry. It was almost immediately, however, that they ran into a singular problem: bad and missing data. 'When we received all the data from the city, it was almost unusable, because there was no material content, among other things,' Gabriel said. 'So we had to develop this risk assessment process based on a combination of what we know generally about textiles globally and what we can infer about practices from each agency's limited descriptions of their textile-based purchases.' This meant everything from uniforms to office carpeting. What the task force found was that cities have unique opportunities to better manage their environmental and procurement policies by investing in infrastructure that will eventually drive down the costs of those activities, even though the assumptions it made in the absence of 'all those intricacies' mean it would have to home in on each agency or even department to make targeted recommendations, she added. The fact that few end-of-life solutions existed despite how resource intensive and polluting it is to create textiles, particularly in the case of synthetics, however, was a major throughline. And that's something that's going to take everyone at every level to change. 'We need the federal and state governments to enact EPR laws which more equitably redistribute the responsibility of textile waste from exclusively local municipalities to include producing firms,' Gabriel said. 'We need local governments to rethink the costs of and incentives for generating waste within their communities: increasing the costs of landfill tipping fees to fund the currently externalized costs to communities for the management of such unbridled waste and at the same time disincentivize out-of-sight, out-of-mind tossing of 'waste' that comes with laughably low fees. We need local, state and federal governments to aggressively invest in the necessary infrastructure to divert textile waste from landfill for use in more circular economies, which can contribute meaningfully to textile-to-textile recycling and other novel applications.' There's also the option to not legislate at all, but experts say that leaving it to businesses to come up with solutions on their own without regulatory carrots or sticks may not bear the same results. They include Phil White, co-founder and chief strategy officer at social innovation agency Grounded World, who said that it's 'weirdly enough' more cost-effective to continue to create, take, make and discard, than it is to build a reverse logistics or infrastructure to help promote circularity. What that has also led to is the phenomenon of 'donation dumping' where unwanted garments get shipped off to countries such as Chile or Ghana, where decaying textiles pile up in collapse-prone mounds, clog up waterways or otherwise fuse into the terrain. 'That's the really strange thing: even though everybody understands the need for circularity and everyone sees the value, including many brands that are starting to commercialize resell and reuse, it's still cheaper, to quite a large extent, to stick to the current linear production and send it to a landfill, incinerator or another country than it is to build a reverse supply chain,' he said. 'So that's the nut that we need to crack. That's the tension in the industry right now.' Congresswoman Pingree, for one, is a fan of EPR and how it puts the responsibility for managing textile waste on its producers. And she intends to pull whatever levers she can find to pass legislation or include language in appropriations bills to push for whatever she can. 'Right now, it's a system where a manufacturer can kind of do anything they want, and then basically the taxpayers, the municipalities have to deal with the waste and the cost of the cleanup,' she said. 'I hope that over time, we're really focusing on how to change the system for many parts of our waste stream, but clothing seems like a prime one.' This article was published in SJ's Sustainability Report. To download the full report, click here.
