Credit: (Joe Shlabotnik/Flickr)WASHINGTON – The Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge will get money for a new headquarters, dredging and construction projects across New Jersey will receive tens of millions of dollars through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and military programs in Newark and Atlantic City will pull in $5 million under a new federal spending bill.
Congressional leaders on Sunday reached an agreement on the deal, an 1,050-page measure expected to pass the House and Senate this week.
Democrats applauded the $7 billion the deal contains for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children program, or WIC, something Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12th) prioritized, while congressional Republicans touted cuts to the law enforcement agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.
“You never get everything you want,” Watson Coleman, New Jersey’s lone member of Congress who sits on an appropriations committee, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “We got some things we wanted. Considering the environment in which we’re operating, it’s probably the best we’re going to get.”
Congress has lurched this year and in 2023 to fund the government. Members of the House on the far-right of the political spectrum, who led the push to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year, have consistently used procedural maneuvers to slow the pace of legislating.
The $460 billion legislation is on track to become law this week, before a partial government shutdown begins midnight Friday, but it will need to overcome rancorous debate in the House and a likely series of amendments in the Senate.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-9th), told NJ Spotlight News he’s more worried about Ukraine military funding than the budget.
“I think we’re heading in the right direction. At least we have something to chew on,” Pascrell said. “Frankly, I’m less concerned about this, because I know it’s going to happen within time, by Friday or maybe next week.”
The package of bills includes funding for swathes of federal agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service and the Food and Drug Administration, to the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Veterans Affairs.
Among federal agencies with deeper ties to New Jersey, the EPA’s Superfund toxic waste site cleanup program – the Garden State has more than any other state – will receive $537.7 million, less than half of its current budget.
Amtrak would get $2.43 billion, a sum slightly below the agency’s current budget and $640 million less than what President Joe Biden requested. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee also touted a provision in the bill to bar the Transportation Department from enforcing a requirement that passengers wear masks on public transit to guard against COVID-19 infection, though federal authorities have long stopped carrying out that mandate. And New Jersey Transit is in line to get $1.6 million for a light transit project in Edison.
Tucked within the legislation is about $28 million to stabilize the shoreline of the Gateway National Recreation Area, which spans New Jersey and New York, and $8 million for Low Cape May Meadows and Cap May Point construction project of the Corps, double what the Biden administration had asked for its in request.
The bill also contains funding for a slew of water projects for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to complete in the waters that bound New York and New Jersey, including $7 million to deepen the New York-New Jersey harbor channel, $13 million for “drift removal” in the harbor and $54.1 million to run the harbor.
Also in the region, the Corps would get $57.7 million for a maintenance project for the Delaware River, called Philadelphia to the Sea, up from $47.9 million the White House requested.
Separately, the bill also designates $510,000 for flood warning systems for the Passaic River and $970,000 for Barnegat Inlet, a region that faces erosion problems.
The bill includes $1.9 million for the Army National Guard’s “readiness center” in Newark and two pockets of money for the Air National Guard’s site at the Atlantic City International Airport: $2 million for a “dining, services and fitness center” and $1.1 million for a training center on the F-16 fighter jet.
The deal contains $12.73 billion for Federal Aviation Administration operations, which the agency said would allow it to hire 1,800 new air traffic controllers and hire 125 new staffers devoted to oversight of Boeing, the maker of the troubled 737 Max jet.
To reach the deal, negotiators swept away demands from right-wing House Republicans to cut WIC funding and folding in a measure to stop new federal rules for patients to access abortion medication.
Booker, Watson Coleman, along with Reps. Donald Norcross (D-1st), Andy Kim (D-3rd), Josh Gottheimer (D-5th), Donald Payne (D-10th) and Mikie Sherrill (D-11th), in January wrote lawmakers negotiating the final budget to fund WIC with what the White House requested.
More than 161,000 people in New Jersey were enrolled in WIC, which provides food and nutrition help to mothers and young children, as of Feb. 9 – an increase of 3.4 percent from a year prior, according to federal data.
“Higher-than-expected program participation and rising food costs mean WIC funding levels proposed in both the House and Senate annual appropriations bills fall far short of what is needed” for the latest budget, the lawmakers said in a Jan. 5 letter.
About 2 million pregnant and postpartum women and young children would be turned away from the program by September, the lawmakers said, without funding from Congress.
Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state who chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, applauded the WIC funding.
“I said I would move mountains to ensure we fully fund WIC—as Congress has done for decades—and that’s what I did,” Murray said, adding that the bill does not bar access to mifepristone, an oral bill that ends pregnancies.
Republicans had pushed to include what is known as a “rider” – language or legislation tacked on to a broader package of bills that doesn’t clearly relate to the underlying bill – to bar the use of mifepristone.
But Republicans did get language included to make it easier for military veterans deemed mentally incompetent to buy a gun.
The Department of Veterans affairs has a policy that flags military veterans who are failing to manage their finances and contemplating death by suicide to a federal gun background check system without a court order.
Republicans included language that would bar the VA from running such a check without a court order, arguing the department’s policy infringes on Second Amendment rights.
Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana who is running one of the hardest Senate races this year, touted his amendment, which was included in the spending bill, that stopped this VA policy.
Booker and Sen. Bob Menendez, both Democrats, voted against the amendment when it came up in October.
Watson Coleman said was overall pleased with the outcome, but singled out the gun provision as displeasing. “That’s just not healthy for anybody,” she said of the language block background checks.
Republicans touted elements of the bill that the process of adding endangered species to a list for federal protection more difficult and cheered deep cuts to the EPA, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives.
“House Republicans secured key conservative policy victories, rejected left-wing proposals, and imposed sharp cuts to agencies and programs critical to President Biden’s agenda,” Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said in a statement.
In their public comments about the budget deal, Republicans have often echoed former President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric sharply critical of federal law-enforcement agencies.
The bill “imposes deep cuts to the EPA, ATF, and FBI, which under the Biden Administration have threatened our freedoms and our economy, while it fully funds veterans’ health care,” Johnson said.
The EPA would receive a 10% cut, and the ATF and FBI, both part of the Justice Department, would get 7% and 6% cuts, respectively.
Marie Owens Powell, president of AFGE Council 238, the EPA’s largest union, upbraided Congress and the cuts the agency faces.
“This budget deal will protect polluters and ignore the public health and economic crises posed by climate change and environmental destruction,” Owens Powell said in a statement. “Texas is experiencing the worst wildfire in its history. Our work is mounting, yet Congress has decided to roll the dice when it comes to protecting the American people in this climate emergency and side with fossil fuel and other heavy-polluting industries.”
