It’s been an ugly start, but the 118th Congress is finally off and running. With the State of the Union and the President’s budget request coming up (not to mention the debt ceiling), here’s what we’re looking at for the rest of the first session of the 118th Congress.

First, there’s the looming fight over raising the debt ceiling. We wrote a Wastebasket about this recently laying out how dangerous this brinksmanship is.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the largest climate spending package to date, passed under budget reconciliation last August. It included $450 billion in spending and $800 billion in new revenue and important updates to the oil and gas leasing system. Where this money ends up and how effective it will be should be top priorities for lawmakers.

The law also boosted funding for the IRS by $80 billion over the next decade. The IRS has suffered from reduced funding, an understaffed and aging workforce, and computer systems that are 60 years old. While not popular, this is a critical agency for the functioning of government. One of the first votes in the House this year was to strip that funding. The Congressional Budget Office scored this bill as costing taxpayers $114 billion. As the first vote of this Congress was to add to the deficit, clearly we have work to do.

Through both the IRA and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Congress appropriated record amounts of cash that could ultimately be spent in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, not all of this money will be spent wisely. Unsurprisingly, we will be keeping an eye on this. Some could get funneled to Big Oil and other well-positioned lobbies that are more concerned with their bottom line than taxpayers. This means not only could we waste our tax dollars but potentially add to our annual climate tax bill.  

That’s right: our climate tax bill. Americans pay more than $120 billion a year rebuilding after catastrophic natural disasters destroying American homes, crops, businesses, and lives. In 2022 alone, weather and climate related disasters cost $165 billion — the third costliest on record and knocking 2021 ($145 billion) to fourth on the list. This is like a tax — a climate tax. And, like the interest payments on our national debt, it is going to continue to grow unless and until we do something about it.

Speaking of doing something about it, there is plenty of opportunity within agriculture and forestry to sequester carbon in our nation’s soils and trees. It’s one of the easier solutions to climate change. This year, lawmakers will take up the next farm bill, the sprawling, once-every-five-years policy and spending bill that covers everything from highly subsidized crop insurance to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Congress has a chance to prioritize investments toward policies and programs that have a proven track record of capturing carbon, promoting conservation, improving soil and water health, and providing farmers with more economic security and resilience.

Alternatively, lawmakers could shower tens of billions more in subsidies on producers of certain crops such as corn and soybeans, whose lobbies have considerable clout in Washington. But as we heard this week from farmers in northeast Nebraska, these subsidies are doing more harm than good for rural communities, beginning farmers, and our land.

And we haven’t even mentioned corn ethanol. It’s become the proverbial self-licking ice cream cone. The fuel has been around since the 1970s on the promise of providing a sustainable, renewable energy source. And even though it has completely failed to deliver any climate benefits, we keep mandating and subsidizing it every step of the way.

One of the reported agreements that came out of the election for Speaker of the House was a commitment to cap Fiscal Year 2024 topline spending to 2022 levels. It’s hard to see that coming to fruition, not least because it would mean shaving more than $100 billion from the defense budget — something a Republican-controlled House is not going to do. Alas, we have and will continue to show how Congress wastes our money on projects the Pentagon didn’t even ask for (and probably have no application for) and legacy weapons systems like the land-based ICBMs that are effectively obsolete but still cost a bundle to keep warm.

Congress will eventually pass another emergency supplemental bill this year to cover the costs of increasingly costly natural disasters like wildfires. TCS will be releasing our analysis of federal wildfire spending this year as we work to improve federal response and mitigation efforts. Not only do we need to stop spending tax dollars on things that are worsening climate change (like fossil fuel subsidies), we need to be smarter about how we spend tax dollars in response to its effects.

Also happening now are an array of rulemakings at agencies across the federal government. We are actively supporting proposals to:

• Curtail methane waste from oil and gas drilling;
• Rein in misguided federal biofuels mandates, through the Renewable Fuel Standard;
• Standardize corporate disclosures of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and climate risk; and
• Amend the Federal Acquisition Regulations to give preference to government contractors that show they are reducing GHG emissions.

This isn’t everything, but it is a lot. We didn’t even mention regular appropriations and Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.