The Rundown
- Democrats on budget committees tell EPA and Interior to halt potential staff cuts during the shutdown.
- White House budget office says $11 billion in Army Corps infrastructure projects will be paused.
- BLM will begin an environmental analysis of a proposed expansion of a Mojave Desert gold mine that will need more groundwater to operate.
And lastly, EPA prepares to permit abandoned hardrock mine cleanups under a new Good Samaritan law.
“If you were a nonprofit or a county with a serious water pollution issue coming out of an old set of mine tailings, you could not work on that problem. The moment you touched it, you accepted total liability for the pollution going downstream. So nobody would ever do anything about all these 140,000 abandoned mines. Almost every one of them having some environmental problem. Almost all of it connected to water.” – Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) speaking with the Western Governors’ Association podcast about the problem of cleaning up abandoned mines in the western United States.
Last year the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act was signed into law. It requires the EPA to permit 15 pilot cleanup projects to be completed within seven years. The projects can be located on private, federal, or state land.
David Hockey, acting director of the EPA Office of Mountains, Deserts, and Plains, said the agency will review project applications starting this fall. He hopes to have the first projects under construction next year and all 15 in progress by summer 2028.
By the Numbers
$11 Billion: Army Corps infrastructure projects that will be “paused,” Russell Vought, the director of the White House budget office, wrote on X. Vought blamed the government shutdown for the freeze. The targeted projects are mostly in states where Democrats are in power, E&E News reports.
News Briefs
Potential Shutdown Staff Cuts
Leading Democrats sent letters to the heads of EPA and Interior asking them to halt potential job cuts at their agencies during the shutdown.
Sen. Jeff Merkeley and Rep. Chellie Pingree are the ranking Democrats on the budget committees that oversee spending by those agencies.
Their concern is over the administration’s use of “reduction in force” during the shutdown to pare the federal workforce closer to President Trump’s vision of a diminished bureaucracy, even though Congress is supposed to set funding levels.
“This coordinated, government-wide approach to implementing RIFs during a lapse in appropriations appears designed to circumvent the appropriations process,” they wrote in their letter to Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator.
Of particular concern, they wrote, are proposed changes and reductions to the EPA’s science assessment and research division.
Similar concerns were raised in the letter to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary.
Studies and Reports
State Revolving Fund Audits
The EPA Office of Inspector General reviewed the financial documents for the state revolving fund programs, the main federal vehicle for water infrastructure funding.
The review found that 42 state drinking water programs and 43 clean water programs had an independent financial audit.
Audited financial statements help to identify wasteful and fraudulent spending.
On the Radar
Shutdown Continues
Nineteen days and counting, as of this writing.
Proposed Mojave Mine Expansion
The Bureau of Land Management will do an environmental impact analysis for a proposed expansion of the Castle Mountain open-pit gold mine in California’s part of the Mojave Desert.
The expansion would extend the mine’s life by 30 years and would entail construction of a 32-mile pipeline to supply 2,250 acre-feet of groundwater per year.
The mine is part of FAST-41, a federal program to accelerate project permitting and environmental reviews through close interagency coordination. The project dashboard suggests that permitting for the Castle Mountain expansion will be completed by December 2026.
Public comments are being accepted through November 20. Submit them via the above link.
A virtual public meeting will be held on November 5 to outline the project and collect public input. Register here.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
