||| FROM THE SPOKESMAN REVIEW ||


WASHINGTON – The most fundamental job of Congress is to fund the government each year, typically through a bipartisan process that distributes dollars more or less evenly between red states and blue states. But a dustup over a dam construction project in Washington state has thrown a wrench into that process and raised the stakes of a government funding showdown in September.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has accused President Donald Trump’s administration of pulling $500 million that Congress allocated last year to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a fish passage project on the Green River, east of Tacoma. In a news conference at the Capitol alongside her fellow Democratic senators from Washington and California, Murray said that move undermines the trust lawmakers rely on to negotiate spending bills.

“Trump is robbing our states in broad daylight, and we are not going to be quiet about this,” Murray said. “President Trump is ripping up the road map that we all agreed on, even the House Republicans, and turning the Army Corps construction funds into his personal political slush fund.”

After Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed last year to appropriate the money for construction at Howard Hanson Dam, Trump shot down the bipartisan funding bill they had negotiated and Congress eventually passed a short-term funding bill, with the help of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and a handful of other Democrats. Murray staunchly opposed that legislation, warning that its wording would give extraordinary leeway to the White House.

Her fears came to pass when Trump’s Office of Management and Budget – helmed by Russell Vought, a lead architect of the policy initiative known as Project 2025 – intervened to redirect Army Corps funding from states represented in the Senate by Democrats to those represented by Republicans.

As the Columbian of Vancouver, Washington, reported, an analysis by Murray’s office found that the Trump administration reallocated funds that were split roughly 50-50 between red and blue states so that only 33% of the money goes to states with two Democratic senators, while 64% goes to states with only GOP senators and 4% to “purple” states with one senator from each party.

In addition to zeroing out the funding for Howard Hanson Dam, the Trump administration cut overall funding for the Army Corps’ civil works projects by about $1.5 billion and slashed the Columbia River Fish Mitigation program – intended to reduce the impact of dams on salmon and steelhead runs – by nearly half.

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