May, 12 2025, 04:47pm EDT
House Bill a Giveaway for Polluters, Cuts Health Protections
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce released its bill text that would be part of a massive tax cut measure for billionaires. In addition to cuts to Medicaid, it contains an unprecedented slate of attacks on the environment and giveaways for the oil and gas industry.
The following is a statement from Alexandra Adams, chief policy advocacy officer at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council):
“This measure is a direct assault on the health of the American people.
“While it slashes health coverage, it gives polluters free rein to foul the air and water. It guts key programs that protect kids from asthma, the elderly from lung and heart disease, and communities that have been inundated with deadly pollutants for decades.
“Cleaning up smog at ports, reducing the methane spewing from oil wells, and making aluminum smelting a cleaner process have all enjoyed broad bipartisan support. But now, the majority is acting with reckless abandon to try and destroy these efforts.
“And while it slashes much-needed support for clean energy and climate resilience, it would allow fossil fuel companies to pay to get their project approved. That’s not just wrong, it’s un-American.
“Congress should reject this radical bill that would harm the health and welfare of the American people.”
Background
As part of the process of developing the reconciliation bill, the House Energy and Commerce committee released its draft measure last night. Its numerous provisions related to the environment, clean energy and fossil fuel projects include:
- Repeals unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds across a variety of programs helping frontline communities, supporting bipartisan emissions reduction grants, assisting state environmental work, and more.
- Rescinds funding to implement the bipartisan American Innovation and Manufacturing Act.
- Rescinds funding for transmission facilities and transmission siting at a time when the U.S. electric grid is in massive need of expansion to meet growing electric demand and maintain reliability.
- Rescinds funding dedicated to environmental review analyses, which would slow down those reviews.
- Allows companies to pay to get a rubber-stamp approval for cross-border pipelines like Keystone XL.
- Repeals the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's clean vehicle standards and the U.S. Department of Transportation's fuel-economy standards.
- Allows gas companies to pay $1 million to the federal government to deem their liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports in the public interest (and therefore authorize their export), whether or not these exports are actually in Americans' public interest.
- Allows gas companies to pay an additional fee for expedited permitting of pipelines and LNG infrastructure that would apply not only to federal permits but also would prohibit state and local governments from protecting their rivers, wetlands, and drinking water reservoirs.
- Effectively removes judicial review from gas permits by severely limiting who can sue over permits.
- Uses taxpayer money to compensate fossil fuel and nuclear companies for projects that do not move forward because they lose in court or are found ineligible for permits. Compensation does not apply to any clean energy projects.
- Repeals critical funds for monitoring, technical assistance, and reducing air pollution in schools.
- Claws back hundreds of millions of appropriated dollars in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) energy efficiency, state and community energy programs, and other core DOE functions.
- Cuts funds to make American industrial manufacturing cleaner and more competitive.
- Slashes funding for communities to conduct air quality monitoring, address impacts of climate change and deadly pollution in their neighborhoods, and reduce air pollution in their homes.
- Strips funding for the purchase of zero-emission port equipment under the Clean Ports Program.
NRDC works to safeguard the earth--its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. We combine the power of more than three million members and online activists with the expertise of some 700 scientists, lawyers, and policy advocates across the globe to ensure the rights of all people to the air, the water, and the wild.
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Judge Slaps Down Trump Administration Scheme to 'Starve' Nation's Top Consumer Protection Watchdog
"If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Dec 30, 2025
President Donald Trump and his administration have been openly plotting to scrap the nation's top consumer protection watchdog, but a federal judge has at least temporarily put those plans on hold.
US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Tuesday that the US Federal Reserve must continue providing funds to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), rejecting the Trump administration's claims that the nation's central bank that the nation's central bank currently lacks to "combined earnings" to fund the bureau's operations.
The administration had argued that the Federal Reserve should not be making payments to the CFPB because it has been operating at a loss since 2022, when it began a series of aggressive interest rate hikes aimed at taming inflation.
However, Jackson rejected this reasoning and accused the administration of using it as a cover to defund an agency that the president and top officials such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, had long expressed a desire to abolish.
"It appears that defendants’ new understanding of 'combined earnings' is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the CPFB of funding," the judge wrote.
The CFPB must now be funded at least until the DC Circuit of Appeals weighs in on an ongoing lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) against Vought over layoffs at the agency that is scheduled for hearings in February.
The NTEU took a victory lap in the wake of the ruling and taunted Vought for his defeat.
"Yet another loss for Rusty Vought," the union posted on Bluesky. "Wonder how much longer Donald is going to put up with this?"
While it will continue to receive funding for the time being, the CFPB has still seen its ability to fulfill its mission severely diminished during Trump's second term.
A Tuesday report from Reuters claimed that the CFPB is "on the brink of collapse" given that the Trump administration, congressional Republicans, and industry lawsuits have "undone a decade's worth of CFPB rules on matters ranging from medical debt and student loans to credit card late fees, overdraft charges and mortgage lending."
The report also noted that, during Trump's second term, the CFPB has "dropped or paused its probes and enforcement actions, and stopped supervising the consumer finance industries, leading to a string of resignations" at the agency.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who first drew up plans to create the CFPB in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, explained the agency's importance in an interview with Reuters.
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UN humanitarian workers gained access to the city last Friday, two months after the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) lost control of el-Fasher to the United Arab Emirates-backed RSF.
The city was the SAF's last major stronghold in Darfur, and fighting has now escalated in the Kordofan region.
Reuters reported that the RSF has attempted to portray el-Fasher as "back to normal" since its takeover, even as the Yale Humanitan Research Lab published a report earlier this month on the mass killings that the paramilitary group have sought hide evidence of "through burial, burning, and removal of human remains on a mass scale."
Denise Brown, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, told Reuters that the few people remaining in el-Fasher are living in empty buildings or tents made of plastic sheets. A small market was operating, but was selling only locally grown vegetables.
"The town was not teeming with people," Brown said. "There were very few people that [we] were able to see... We have photos of people, and you can see clearly on their faces the accumulation of fatigue, of stress, of anxiety, of loss."
Healthcare staff were seen at Saudi Hospital in el-Fasher, where 460 people were killed in an RSF attack, but they were working without medical supplies, Brown said.
Yale's report earlier this month relied partially in satellite imagery taken between October 26-November 28, which showed clusters of what researchers said were consistent with human remains in and around el-Fasher. More than 70% of the clusters had become smaller in satellite images by late November, and 38% were no longer visible.
The researchers said the RSF has used particular patterns of killing, including murdering people as they flee attacks, door-to-door and execution-style killings, and mass killings at detention centers and military installations.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, said the UN's discovery of few signs of life in el-Fasher corroborated the lab's findings.
Brown said the UN team is "still very concerned about those who are injured, who we didn’t see, those who may be detained," and told Reuters the officials plan to return to assess water and sanitation access.
About 100,000 people fled el-Fasher in October, and about three-quarters of those forced to leave the city were already internally displaced people who had fled violence as many as three or more times. In total 1.17 million el-Fasher residents have been displaced.
Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), released a short documentary detailing the experiences of people who left the city and are sheltering in Chad.
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The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is "in turmoil" one year into Trump's second term, resulting in a customer service system that has "deteriorated."
The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.
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