How Congress Kills the Environment

This fall Congress is launching an assault on the laws that protect the water we drink, the air we breathe, the forests we cherish and the food we eat. Few, if any, legislators will be held accountable, nor will they even bother to debate most of the measures.

The legislation, proposed by the leadership in the Senate and House, would keep arsenic, a known carcinogen, in your drinking water. It would set minimum quotas for cutting timber in National Forests, requiring the Forest Service to make logging a budget priority. It would eliminate funding that Congress -- under Newt Gingrich -- unanimously authorized to protect children from harmful pesticide residues in our food. And it would constrain the country's ability to address the greenhouse effect, even though the vast majority of the world's scientists and nations consider the threat real and potentially cataclysmic.

These are not obscure initiatives that will languish forgotten in the archives of congressional subcommittees. They are "riders" attached to appropriations bills, legislation that Congress absolutely must pass each year to keep the government running. Like barnacles on an ocean liner, riders are miniscule compared to their host bills, and their authors hope that they seem just as insignificant. Yet politicians use riders to slip into legislation policies that may have a profound impact, and that would otherwise be vetoed or would be too controversial for Congress to support in broad daylight. The appropriations process -- a perennially urgent struggle to keep the government liquid and the constituencies well stuffed with pork -- provides the ideal cover.

This is hardly a new strategy. In fact, despite a nineteenth century House rule banning it, the majority in Congress has traditionally waived the rule and exploited the riders.

Yet while it may not be a new strategy, it is one that has attracted growing criticism since 1995, when the Republicans took control of Congress and began an annual assault on the environment.

The few dozen advocates who fight riders each fall on Capital Hill regard the battle as a legislative stick-up perpetrated by mercenary lawmakers whose campaigns depend upon the generosity of corporations in messy sectors: hard-rock mining, petroleum, automobiles, pesticide manufacturing and the like. For leading environmental groups the battle is a perpetual strain on staff and resources.

Anna Aurilio, a lobbyist with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, points out that the playing field is tilted decidedly in favor of the polluters. As major campaign contributors, she says, they can propose pet riders during private meetings with legislators, who willingly insert -- often with the knowledge of few legislators and with little or no debate -- the well-camouflaged lines into spending bills that run hundreds of pages long.

To ferret out these amendments, environmentalists are forced to rely on tips from pro-environment congressional staffers who are typically busy with other budget priorities. "It is very, very, very difficult to get the actual bill language -- you have to beg, borrow or steal the language, and often the bill is not ready until it is nearly ready to be voted on," says Aurilio. In some cases, anti-environmental riders have eluded both the environmentalists and their allies in Congress.

Last year, in no small part due to the riders, the budget battle raged for weeks past the October 1 deadline. Finally, to keep the government running, the congressional leadership and the White House resorted to late night negotiations on a single bill that ran on for thousands of pages. With no access to the bill language, environmental lobbyists set up camp outside of the Capital Hill negotiating rooms to buttonhole legislators and White House negotiators. Yet despite the vigilance, a number of harmful riders slipped through.