President Biden Signs Omnibus Spending Bill
On Thursday, 12/29, President Biden signed the omnibus spending bill, after a flurry of year-end Congressional activity to avoid a government shutdown. It’s going to take some time to sort through the over 4.000-page bill to find all of the sections that might impact drinking water and to determine all of the impacts on drinking water programs and drinking water systems.
However, the inceasing earmarks (Congressional Directed Spending) are having an increasing negative impact on the long-term sustainability of the State Revolving Loan Funds (SRFs). The drinking water earmarks for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 are $609,255,899, almost double the FY 2022 earmarks. This increasing amount of earmarks results in the FY23 DWSRF allotments being almost half of the FY21 allotments (the last year before the earmarks started up again) and this is not sustainable.
