"The Senate is taking steps this week to hand the EPA its largest budget in a decade, offering the agency nearly $3 billion more than the White House’s request.

If the White House accepts the Senate’s $9.011 billion appropriation for the EPA, the agency would receive its second-highest budget in history.

It’s less than the $9.53 billion offered in the House bill, but the boost in funding could help reinvigorate the EPA—where employment recently sunk to levels not seen since the Reagan administration—by adding money to clean up toxic “forever chemicals” in drinking water and to beef up enforcement.

“It’s such a striking repudiation of the administration’s proposal,” Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA in the Obama administration who now teaches at Wake Forest University, told Bloomberg Environment. “The fact that this number is going the other way is an affirmation of the support that the agency enjoys.”"

Tiffany Stecker and Dean Scott report for Bloomberg Environment October 22, 2019. [2]