Roth: Budget cuts will have long-term costs

As you certainly are aware, a federal shutdown was recently averted with the passage of the compromise budget bill. It’s hard to find a lawmaker on either side of the aisle who is actually happy with the outcome and the numbers thrown around in the debate were sometimes mind-boggling.

The objective was fair. Lawmakers aimed to determine those areas in the federal budget that could be streamlined or eliminated to the benefit of our nation’s long-term prosperity. No government program or service seemed to be excluded from the conversation. Now that Congress’ work on the 2011 budget is complete, we’re left to sort through the results and determine exactly what message our leaders are trying to send.

With every billion dollars in cuts here and there, we saw American priorities assigned a dollar figure. My concern is that we’re left with a budget that drastically undersells the value of our shared environment and public health.

The budget for fiscal year 2011 includes $1.6 billion in cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, an arm of the government that has become a favorite target of federal spending hawks. The general opposition to the EPA has surfaced as a perception that environmental regulation stifles economic growth. That argument is nothing new, and was especially prevalent at the inception of the Clean Air Act and its major amendments passed in 1970 under Republican President Richard Nixon.

Most of this year’s cuts to the EPA, however, frustratingly mesh an economic agenda with real public health implications. For example, most of the $1.6 billion in cuts to the agency are being pulled from the Clean and Safe Drinking Water Revolving Funds, which help states and municipalities improve the quality of their waterways. Cuts have also been directed at the agency’s support of state-level programs for air and climate protection, among others.

The EPA has not been entirely shackled by this budget, but all indications point to an impending all-out assault on the regulation of harmful pollutants that enter our nation’s air and water every day. The policy message sent by supporters of cuts to the EPA during the budget battle is pretty clear: Our resources are our own; exploiting them for profit makes fiscal sense; and regulating our air and water is an unnecessary burden.

I’m not sure how this message bodes well for our future, and it seems at odds with the vast effort to rein in government spending. Such policy might mean the beginning of a reduction in overall federal spending, but what mechanisms will we rely on to ensure that our children have safe water to drink and clean air to breathe? Oklahomans today understand these concerns in some instances better than anyone, given recent battles in the state over water resources and clean air (it’s been well-documented that more than 100,000 of our state’s children already suffer from asthma).

The next round of budget negotiations is already looming. I’m hopeful that our leaders aren’t too eager to cut too much “green” at the expense of our actually being “green.” Our environment and our children’s health simply can’t afford it.

Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma corporation commissioner, is an attorney with Phillips Murrah P.C. in Oklahoma City, where his practice focuses on clean, green energy for Oklahoma.