Poison Pills in Fiscal Responsibility Act Sacrifice Environmental Justice and Community Health; Shrinks the Social Safety Net
Over the weekend, McCarthy and Biden released a draft bill to raise the debt ceiling and to prevent impending government shutdown.
In reaction to the announcement, Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Co-Executive Director at the Climate Justice Alliance, a national nonprofit representing 89 rural and urban community-based environmental justice organizations and supporting networks, said:
“Addressing the debt ceiling is vital to avoid a government shutdown that could impact millions of poor and working class Americans. The so-called ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act,’ however, takes harmful detours in addressing this critical issue, by attaching poison pills that have nothing to do with the debt ceiling, including: fast-tracking the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, drastically limit community input on fossil fuel projects, gutting bedrock environmental protections so that oil and gas pipelines and other energy projects would be completely exempt, and targeting poor families who depend on food assistance programs.
Our communities have called upon their elected officials clearly, loudly, and successfully to stop this dirty deal in its multiple iterations since Senator Manchin tried to make a deal in order to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Our demands have not changed. We demand a public and transparent debate of all policy proposals, that environmental justice communities are no longer sacrificed, that our positive vision of permitting reform be the guide for any legislation, and that we ensure a Just Transition away from fossil fuels by stopping expansion of and investment in fossil fuel infrastructure. We need a clean debt ceiling bill, not a bill with poison pills like a new handout to the fossil fuel industry in the form of this so-called permitting reform.”
