The expected passage of the Inflation Reduction Act is going to strain an EPA workforce that’s already under pressure to carry out the mandates in last November’s infrastructure bill, observers said Monday.
The additional workload raises questions about the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to cope without quickly bringing on many more employees, according to Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator.
“All of this activity creates more demands on an agency that has been struggling to get enough budget to carry out its prior functions even before this happened,” said Meiburg, now executive director at Wake Forest University’s Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability.
Many other federal agencies “are seeking to ramp hiring simultaneously to meet bipartisan infrastructure law requirements, and this will only add to that talent pool draw,” agreed John Miller, a former branch chief at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s enforcement office and now a director at Cowen Inc.'s Washington Research Group.
Under the climate provisions in the bill (H.R. 5376) that the Senate passed on Sunday, billions of dollars in new funding would flow into the EPA for work on many fronts, including a program to reduce methane emissions from the natural gas sector, an effort to roll out zero-emission technology, a program to cut air pollution in facilities like ports, and...
Darlene Musgrove inflated clients’ refunds with false deductions, costing the federal government about $127,166, prosecutors said. What's on your ballot: Prop 141 prohibit taxes or fees on miles tr...