Start discussing, in detail, the budgets of public entities if you need a shortcut to glazing over people’s brains. That’s true whether it’s a municipality or the federal government being talked about, which is a drag because spending is what makes policy. A policy without an adequate budget for implementation and enforcement might as well be no policy at all. Indeed, budget is policy.
Yogin Kothari, Washington representative of the Center for Science and Democracy, points out on the blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists that there’s another matter needing attention in the too-much-ignored budgeting process—the buckets of inappropriate ideological riders members of Congress seek to attach to each year’s budget bill. This is done because these riders would never survive if they were introduced as stand-alone bills:
The reason they don’t want you to know about these poison pill policies is because often, these riders are special interests’ backdoor attempt to weaken science-based public protections for their own gain. And like clockwork, they continue to appear, and lawmakers continue to hope that no one will notice.
Last year, Kothari continues, some 200 groups got together to make phone calls, tweet, and otherwise seek to ensure that lawmakers knew people opposed these ideological riders. As a consequence of this grassroots effort, riders that weren’t approved would have kept the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from establishing a rule on worker exposure to silica dust; that would have constrained federal scientists from studying the impact of hydraulic fracturing; and that would have kept experts from advising the Environmental Protection Agency.
With the early talks around the 2017 fiscal year budget now underway, it’s necessary to remain vigilant and continue the previous efforts because these science-bashing riders won’t go away unless they are exposed and objected to. Here's a sampling of possible riders that are coming up.
- A rider that could take significant science-based policy decisions out of the hands of relevant agencies and instead require congressional approval for public protections. This would hamstring agencies and prevent them from moving forward with any proposal that could improve public health and safety (if this sounds familiar to you, that’s because we’ve talked about it in the past here, here, and here). A version of this has already been submitted as an amendment to the Energy-Water spending bill being considered in the Senate.
- The Environmental Protection Agency’s new science-based ozone standard. We’ve already seen legal challenges and new legislation attacking the newscience-based safeguard that would help reduce toxins that impact the air we breathe. Why not add a rider to the list of attacks?
- Multiple riders that will undermine the Endangered Species Act. One of the most successful science-based environmental laws, we have seen a record number of riders and other attacks that would negatively impact the government’s ability to use science to protect our nation’s most imperiled species.
Let your representative in Congress know that you look askance at such machinations. And if you see one or more of them being introduced, in addition to tweeting or otherwise alerting people to them via social media, think about writing a letter to your local editor, focusing on that rep’s position in the matter. If s/he’s on the right side, that deserves a letter as well. All too often, we forget to thank the reps who take our concerns seriously—not just during campaign season, but when it really counts.