This week, the House continued the annual appropriations process with consideration of the FY 2014 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. In short, the Energy and Water appropriations bill is a mixed bag. It funds a number of agency budgets including, pretty obviously, the Department of Energy. But it also funds the Department of the Interiors Bureau of Reclamation and a variety of different nuclear agencies. Ill spare you an exhaustive list of each agency budget and where each comes in compared to last years enacted levels and this years request from the president.
Instead, Im going to focus on one piece of the bill this week the Army Corps of Engineers. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years battling the Army Corps on a number of local issues, and this week, I offered an amendment to try to help fix that problem.
For those of you who arent familiar with the Army Corps, they have about 37,000 civilians and soldiers delivering engineering services all over the world. They deliver public engineering services from disaster mitigation and response to reducing environmental degradation of public works projects. For those of you who are familiar with the Army Corps, you may not know that they also have a tendency to get sued a lot.
For the better part of the last two years, Ive been assisting Hernando County with a municipal dredging project. Without getting too deep into all of the history, it means jobs in the area and the county has bent over backwards to ensure that any environmental disruption was kept to an absolute minimum. But like so many projects that the Army Corps is involved in, the county has had to jump through hoop after hoop. The guidance is unclear. Its ambiguous. And when the county takes steps to address that guidance, it never quite seems to be enough. And thats just one of several Army Corps projects Ive been working on.
In our conversations, the Army Corps readily admits that they are slow to move on this and many other projects because they are afraid of getting sued. There are environmental organizations, which wait until the moment is right and then sue the federal government for monetary damages alleging environmental harm. Like many defendents in frivolous lawsuits, the government often decides that the cost of settling is cheaper than the cost of fighting the suit in a drawn-out court case. And so
they settle.
The piece of all of this that really got under my skin was when I learned that many of the organizations who bring up these lawsuits are also recipients of federal grants. In other words, a seemingly wholesome group applies for federal tax dollars for a seemingly wholesome purpose and then uses those tax dollars to sue the federal government. They get money out of the lawsuit and then use that money to hire people to apply for more grants. Then they use that grant money to fund more lawsuits against the government. It goes on and on and on.
Its probably worth noting at this point, in case its not obvious, but whenever I say government, what were really talking about is taxpayers. These organizations use your money to sue you to get more of your money. Its absurd on the face of it. The fact that these lawsuits, or even just the fear of these lawsuits, are stopping projects that will create jobs in this area makes it completely unacceptable.
And so, as the House was considering the Energy and Water Appropriations bill, I offered a limitation amendment basically saying that no funds made available in the bill could be used to sue the federal government. Unfortunately, due to a lot of procedural / technical / parliamentary nonsense, I was not permitted to draft the amendment narrowly enough to only target the frivolous lawsuits. The amendment therefore would have roped in legitimate organizations, including contractors, who do in fact have good reason to sue. And as much as I preach about the dangers of unintended consequences in poorly thought out legislation, I certainly wasnt going to force the issue when I knew full well that there would be unintended consequences. As such, I offered my amendment on the floor, said my piece, and withdrew.
Hopefully, I’ve put these organizations on notice that were going to address this issue in the future. This bill just presented the first opportunity to raise my concerns. Ill keep you posted going forward as to how all of this shakes out, but for the time being, this is where we stand.
As always, please feel free to forward this on to friends and family in the community so that they know whats going on up here. It is critically important that were all on the same page so that I can get your insights as to where we should be moving going forward.
U.S. Rep. Rich Nugent, R-Hernando, represents a sizable portion of The Villages.