 I'd like to say, first of all, welcome to Congressional Climate Camp. I'm Dan Bressette with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And me, my ESI colleagues, our panelists, we are going to be your counselors for Climate Camp today. We are going to hear all about the budget and appropriations process. It's going to be a really, really great session. In addition to our two panelists, we have one joining us remotely today for reasons, but it's going to be well worth the 10-minute delay. Hopefully that meant everyone has a little bit of extra time to go get some donuts. Before we dig into the show, I would like to say special thanks to Senator Chris Van Hollen and his excellent staff for helping us get the room today. We couldn't do it without them. And I'm a Marylander, so very proud to call him one of my senators. So thank you very much, Senator Van Hollen and his staff. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute dates back to 1984. Oops. One of these days, the slide will move. There it goes. We were founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide policymaker education resources. And our focus is Congress, although a lot of other people use our materials, like journalists, members of the public, students. And our focus is really climate change. We started out environmental and energy. And in 1988, our board of directors decided that climate change was the topic that would drive all of our work. Today, we provide all sorts of resources. This is just a snapshot of some of them. We do briefings like this. Probably our highest profile thing that we do. We cover all sorts of issues in briefings. For example, in December, the last briefing of the year that we did was about COP 27. We did what we called the ReCOP, where we had experts come in and help congressional staff understand what had just happened in Charnell Shake, Egypt, and why that's important for Congress to know. We're here today doing climate camp. We have other great briefings coming up. We also do a lot of writing. The best way to keep up with all of our materials is to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Articles, fact sheets, issue briefs, podcasts. Really, we try to come up with all sorts of materials that are widely and easily accessible. Everything is available for free online at www.esi.org. And I encourage everyone, if you're not already, not just to sign up for our newsletter, but also to follow us on social media. I mentioned that we cover a lot of ground. For the next couple of weeks, our focus is going to be on congressional climate camp, so we have a session today. Two weeks from today, we'll be back to talk about public polling and public attitudes about climate change and how those have changed. Two weeks after that, we'll be back talking about greenhouse gas emissions that aren't carbon dioxide, so fluorinated gases and methane and things like that. And then two weeks after that, we'll wrap up the series talking about the implementation status of the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. So that is going to be a really all-star panel. All of our panels are all-star panels, but that one I know is something that's going to be on everybody's mind as we move forward. If you haven't already signed up for the whole series, I encourage you to do so. If you sign up but you can't attend, that's really no problem. We've got you covered because we always have a live webcast. Sometimes we're on C-SPAN, and we also make sure that all of our presentation materials and summary notes are available within a few weeks of when we hold the briefing. So never fear. You'll never miss anything. We do our best to take care of you. I'm one of 15 people at ESI. I'm joined by many of my colleagues, a couple of them are up here. We are all around the room. Most of us are wearing our lapel pins, so if you have any questions, we have the room for a little while after we're done our session today. Find us. Talk to us. We'll do our best to find you and talk to you. If you have questions about climate change topics, we'd love to come in and meet with you or maybe point you in the right direction or help you meet the right experts from other organizations. After climate camp, we're going to be Farm Bill. My colleague Savannah is working really, really hard. My colleague Miguel is here is working really, really hard on materials on agriculture climate solutions, including financing solutions and grants and rebates and all the great stuff that the Farm Bill does. Before I turn it over to our panel, I just wanted to say that we will have time for questions today. And there are two for folks in the room. We will have a roving microphone. My colleague Allison will be wandering around and we'll do our best to get everybody's questions. If you're on or if you're in our online audience and many of you are on our online audience today, you can still ask questions and we'll do our best to get to all of them. You can send us an email. The email address to use is ask. Ask at esi.org. You can also follow us on Twitter or other social media at ESI online. And we'll have, like I said, do our best to incorporate those questions into our discussion. So we're joined today by what's the thing where it's like if you had a desert island, like what would be the one thing you would want? This is who are the three people you would want to learn about budget and appropriations from? And we have them for you today. And the first of our panelists is Angela Jones. Angela is an analyst in environmental policy at the Congressional Research Service. And of course, CRS provides nonpartisan research and analysis to members of Congress, their staff, and congressional committees. Angela's policy portfolio includes the environmental protection agency's budget and appropriations, environmental justice, and carbon capture and storage issues. Before CRS, Angela provided environmental policy and regulatory analysis in the government consulting and nonprofit sectors. Angela, welcome to the lectern today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. Just to recap, for those of you not familiar with CRS, we are part of the Library of Congress. And as Dan mentioned, we provide Congress with nonpartisan, authoritative, confidential, objective, timely research and analysis. So today I'm going to provide just an overview of the annual appropriations process and discuss recent appropriations at a high level. And with a focus on US Environmental Protection Agency or EPA appropriations. So the annual appropriation cycle in a nutshell. So the steps presented here assume that the process is occurring in a normal year or cycle. Just so you know, that's not always the case. So in step one, the president submits the budget to Congress. So the president submits the annual, starts the annual budget cycle with a submission of annual budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year to Congress. So the president is required to submit this annual budget on or before the first Monday in February. So Congress has provided deadline extensions, though, both statutory and sometimes informally. For the past year, President Biden submitted his fiscal year 2023 budget proposal to Congress on March 28th of 2022. So in the budget, the president recommends spending levels for various programs and agencies within the federal government in the form of a budget authority. So budget authority refers to the authority provided by federal law to enter into contracts or financial obligations. But an authority is obligated within the period authorized in statute. So this can be one year, multiple years, or what's called no year. But outlays, on the other hand, for financial expenditures may occur over time. So after the president submits the budget proposal to Congress, each agency generally provides additional detailed justification materials to the House and the Senate appropriations subcommittees with jurisdiction over its funding. So in step two, Congress adopts a budget resolution. So you might have heard reference to budget enforcement or limits for appropriations measures. So under the congressional budget process, enforcement has both statutory and procedural elements. So for example, in prior years, some statutory elements derived from the Budget Control Act of 2011 were imposed at limited discretionary spending for each fiscal year from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2021. So the procedural elements of budget enforcement generally stem from requirements under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 or the CBA. So the budget resolution is Congress's response to the president's budget. It's its concurrent resolution, but it's not law because it's an agreement between the House and the Senate that establishes the overall budgetary and fiscal policy to be carried out by subsequent legislation. And through the CBA process, the appropriations committee in each chamber, as well as their subcommittees, receives a procedural limit on the total amount of the budget authority for the upcoming fiscal year. The budget resolution must cover at least five fiscal years. So the upcoming fiscal year referred to as the budget year plus four subsequent fiscal years. So the budget resolution sets total new budget authority and outlay levels for each fiscal year covered by the resolution. It also allocates federal spending among 20 functional categories, such as national defense, agriculture, transportation. And it sets budget authority and outlay levels for each function. And within each chamber, the total new budget authority and outlays for each fiscal year are also allocated among the committees with jurisdiction over spending, setting spending ceilings for each committee. So the House and Senate's committees on appropriations receive allocations only for the upcoming fiscal year because appropriations measures are annual. Once the appropriations committee received their spending ceilings, they separately subdivide, they count among the receptive subcommittees, providing spending ceilings for each subcommittee. So the CBA established April 15th as the target deadline for congressional adoption of the budget resolution, although Congress has frequently not met the state. But there's no penalty if the budget resolution is not completed by April 15th or even if it's not completed at all. So the act prohibits both House and Senate floor consideration of the appropriations measures for the upcoming fiscal year before Congress completes the budget resolution. And in the Senate, it actually prohibits it before the Senate appropriations committee receives its spending ceilings. So if Congress delays completion of the annual budget resolution or doesn't adopt one, each chamber may adopt what's called a deeming resolution to address these procedural difficulties. Okay, so in step three, Congress considers appropriations measures. So traditionally, the House has initiated considerations of regular appropriations measures and the Senate would then consider and amend the House passed bills. More recently, the Senate appropriations subcommittees and committee have sometimes not waited for the House. Instead, they've reported original Senate bills. So under this approach, the House and Senate appropriations committees and their subcommittees have often considered the regular bills simultaneously. So the House appropriations committee reports the 12 regular appropriation bills separately to the full House. The committee generally reports the bills in May and June and generally the House starts four considerations of these regular appropriation bills in May or June as well. The Senate appropriations committee typically begins reporting the bills in June and generally completes committee consideration prior to the August recess. And the Senate just typically begins four consideration beginning in June or July. Consideration by the full House and Senate may continue through the fall. When Congress has traditionally considered and improved the regular appropriation bills separately, delays in the process may mean that one or more appropriations measures may not receive a separate initial consideration in that several appropriations bills may be combined into a single legislative vehicle prior to enactment. And this is typically referred to as an omnibus appropriations measure. And if this whole process is not completed prior to October 1st, which is the start of the fiscal year, Congress may need to enact one or more measures to provide temporary funding authority to prevent a funding gap. And this has traditionally been provided in the form of a joint resolution to allow agencies or programs to continue to obligate funds at a particular rate. And this may be the rate of operations for the previous fiscal year for a specific period of time. And these measures are known as continuing resolutions or CRs. And they can range from a single day to an entire fiscal year. All right, moving on to step four, almost done. House and Senate confer to resolve the differences. So this is, after they've approved the measure, the constitution requires that the House and Senate for any measure approve the same, precisely the same form and the same measure before it may be presented to the president for his signature or veto. So the appropriations committee in each chamber will try to negotiate a resolution that resolves the differences. It has generally been that they could be in a conference committee to resolve the differences, but agreement can also be reached through an exchange of amendments between the House. In the final step, the president may sign or veto the measure. So as I mentioned, the House and Senate committee on appropriations have jurisdiction over the annual appropriations measures. And each committee is organized into 12 parallel subcommittees that were reorganized in 2006. Now here you're seeing the names of the House. Appropriations subcommittees, there's parallel committees in the Senate and a couple of them have slightly different titles just to be aware. So after the president submits the budget, the House and the Senate appropriations subcommittees hold hearings on the segments of the budget under their jurisdiction. They focus on the details of the agency's justification which provides the supporting material to the budget submission. And agency officials often testify at the hearings and they may be supplemented by meetings and communications between the subcommittee staff and agency officials. The subcommittees can also solicit information and input from members of Congress as far as programmatic levels and the language to be included in their appropriations bills and the accompanying committee reports. So to recap, appropriations bills provide budget authority to and direction to agencies. Additional guidance is usually contained within the appropriations committee report language. So after conducting the hearings, the House and Senate appropriations committee make their sub allocations and the subcommittees themselves begin to draft, mark up and report the regular bills under their jurisdiction to the respective full committees. So both appropriations committee consider each subcommittees recommendations separately. The committees may adopt amendments to the subcommittees recommendations prior to reporting the bills and making them available for further consideration by the respective chambers. So for example, EPA appropriations are piloted here. They're contained in the interior environment and related agencies bill. And so the funding, the recommendations for various programs within EPA are contained within the accompanying report language or explanatory statement to the interior environment and related agencies bill. The report language does not have the same effect as law, although the agencies usually follow much of what is contained in the report. So for the rest of the presentation, I'm gonna illustrate how this process works for one agency again, will be seen on EPA appropriation. As I mentioned, since fiscal year 2006, Congress has funded EPA in the interior environment and related agencies appropriations bills. So this figure just provides an overall breakdown of the funding. So other agencies in this bill include the Department of Interior, the Forest Service, the Indian Health Service. So I'm providing this example for fiscal year 2021 and 2022 just to illustrate how appropriations have been distributed within this subcommittee in recent years. Fiscal year 2023 appropriations were just recently enacted so they're not actually included in this particular figure. So I'm gonna point that out, but it still provides a good overview. So EPA appropriations are included in the green sections of the graph in the middle there. So a little more information on EPA. EPA's primary responsibilities have evolved over time and they include the regulation of air quality, water quality, and chemicals in commerce, the development of regulatory criteria for the management of disposal of solid and hazardous waste, and the remediation of environmental contamination. Although EPA sets uniform pollution control standards and regulations on a national level, the implementation and enforcement of many of these standards and regulations are delegated to states and tribes, and this will be important because EPA also provides substantial financial assistance to states, tribes, and local governments to aid them in administering these delegated pollution control programs and complying with certain federal environmental requirements. So this figure presents trends over time, the amount requested by the administration and enacted regular or discretionary and supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2014. I do wanna point out that this graph does include supplemental information whereas the graph on the previous slide did not include supplemental, just something to keep in mind that they're not exactly showing the same amounts, but they're good illustrations of the general trends. So for fiscal year 22, you might notice that the Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act provided an additional $14 billion for EPA in the emergency supplemental appropriations on top of regular annual appropriations. You can see that jump on the graph there. In addition, the Inflation and Reduction Act of 2022 as the measure is usually called provided an additional $41.47 billion to EPA in permanent or mandatory appropriations on top of regular annual appropriations. So for fiscal year 2023, the current fiscal year, Congress appropriated 10.14 billion in regular annual appropriations to EPA and additional 1.67 billion in supplemental appropriations. These appropriations were enacted as part of a consolidated or an omnibus appropriations. So going one step further down in detail, so the funding for discretionary spending for EPA is annually appropriated among 10 statutory accounts established by Congress over time. So this figure shows the trends since 2014 as well as a distribution of funding among EPA's accounts. So for EPA, historically, the State and Tribal Assistance Grants, which is the bright blue portion of the graph and the Environmental Program and Management accounts and that's in dark blue at the bottom have received the largest share of funding followed by the Superfund and the Science and Technology accounts. So in recent years, a number of EPA funding issues have been the subject of congressional debate and reflected in the appropriations bills and the explanatory statements. So these issues are likely to continue to be the subject of discussion in 118 Congress and fiscal year 2024 appropriations. So some selected examples I have up here. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of potential issues. There are many. These are just some examples, including financial assistance, as I mentioned. So Congress appropriates funds to EPA to support the agency's primary responsibilities in coordination with states and tribes. So the adequacy of the funding of these financial assistance and grants has been a perennial issue. Just as one example, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023. Congress appropriated funding to EPA for multiple water infrastructure programs intended to address concerns about the condition of the nation's local drinking water and wastewater infrastructure and the financial challenges that communities are facing in this. Another issue is PFAS. So policymakers and various stakeholders have urged federal agencies, including EPA, to act more quickly and more broadly to address PFAS, which is a group of fornated compounds that have been used for various purposes. So current law authorizes specific criteria to regulate or take other action on PFAS. Also, the adequacy of funding to remediate or clean up contaminated sites has been a longstanding issue among states, local governments and communities located near contaminated sites and other stakeholders, as well as climate air quality and climate change. So several EPA air quality and climate change activities typically receive a lot of attention in annual appropriations discussions. These activities include things like regulations under the Clean Air Act to address emissions of greenhouse gases, air pollutants and climate change science and adaptation. Also environmental justice. In recent explanatory statements, Congress has actually supported increased funding to EPA for environmental justice related activities and programs. And so the amount of funding for these programs which actually span across the agency continues to be an issue of interest. And finally, although Congress does not set specific staffing levels for EPA, an annual appropriations act, the size and the structure of EPA's workforce has continued to be a topic of discussion in annual appropriations debates. So thank you for your time. If you'd like to learn more about the appropriations process or other legislative topics, please visit our CRS reports website at CRS.reports.gov. And thanks very much. Thank you, Angela. That was a great presentation. And yeah, CRS staff person's best friend for Angela as an expert on her issues, but there are many, many, many experts at CRS who are experts on pretty much anything you can think of. So a tremendous resource. Thanks very much for being here today. And I'm looking forward to coming back to some of these issues too in our Q&A. Our second panelist is Franz Werfman-Stobler. Franz has worked in public service for more than two decades where he has had the privilege of working for several Democratic senators from West Virginia, North Dakota and Delaware, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee. His portfolio has included climate change, energy, environment, science and technology and general appropriations issues. Throughout his career, Franz has sought to find common ground approaches in advanced major legislative initiatives and continues to engage in that work at the Bipartisan Policy Center by focusing on efforts to build bipartisanship and improve public discourse. And special note, Franz is a member of the ESI advisory board, which we are very, very grateful for. Franz, it's awesome to see you. Please join me at the lectern and I'll turn it over to you. And here's your clicker. Thanks, Dan, and thanks everyone for being here. What I thought I'd do today is I know a number of the members that are in the audience, but also many of you might be online are staff who are on Capitol Hill for the House with the Senate. And I just wanted to let you know that as a former staffer, a lot of what I'm going to say here is kind of directed to you to the types of things that you might be dealing with. I have been there and I know these are some of the challenges that you deal with in an everyday basis. I love this little cartoon, I guess, used it for a number of years. And basically it's this sort of the challenge of governance, it's the challenge of legislating. In the bottom right is basically that you needed the tire swing and in the middle bottom, it's how it's understood by the public, how it's reported by the media and maybe a little bit we're going to get to but it's basically like it didn't actually get funded as the authorizing bill got passed. But this is the complex challenge that we're talking about today. Angela did a great job of explaining the general budget process and this is not to scare you as a chart, sometimes people put this up, but it's to explain that much of what we're talking about today began in the 1974 Budget and Empowerment Control Act. This occurred with President Nixon and an empowered post Watergate Democratic Congress and both found a reason to reform and come up with the very system that we're talking about today. So when we talk about the budget resolutions and the appropriations process, much of that is founded in this very process. This legislation created the CBO, it created the budget committees and all of that and I would say that many of the debates that we're having here today about deficit spending, about budget authority, they're doing things. These are the same things that we're talking about 50 years ago. So a lot of this is new, but it's still old. At the end of the day, this still requires bipartisan support to move through the Congress. The President submits the budget on the left side there is really the sort of the general authorizing committee process and oversight on the far right and yellow is the appropriations process and then the middle is the budget committee process. Angel also went through the different subcommittees and that's helpful. A couple of things I'd like to point out is when they say appropriations, appropriations is the same thing as discretionary spending. This is the part that has to happen on the annual basis. So the President submits the unified budget to Congress. My understanding is the State of the Union is going to be on February 7th and there hasn't been a decision made on when the President would be submitting the FY24 bill yet, but that might be at some point after that. That budget when it comes up to Capitol Hill is then divided in many different ways. So the demandatory side of it goes to certain committees in Congress. The finance committee, the health committee, the ag committee in the Senate, several months of their counterparts, the tax side of that would go to the Ways and Means Committees or to the Finance Committees. But the discretionary part of that goes to the Appropriations Committees. Those are, as Angela pointed out, the Appropriations Committee and the Senate and the House, they're parallel. They're exactly the same. That is not the same for the authorizing committees per se which don't always have the same jurisdiction. Another thing that you may hear a lot about is defense and non-defense in terminology. So not exclusively, but the big defense bubble and then the smallest, slightly smaller one, which is the military construction veterans affairs, that is kind of known as the defense side of the budget. And then these other 10 bubbles are the non-defense side. Now that is not exactly how it breaks down, but that will give you a basics. Another aspect that a lot of people don't get a sense of is that there are three co-equal branches of government. That's something we're supposed to learn in basic civics. If you look down at the bottom right corner, it says the legislative branch less than 1%. The legislative branch is about half of a percent, half of 1%. And then above that is the financial services general government, FSTG, subcommittee. And within that is the judiciary, the third branch of government. So the legislative branch and the judiciary together make up 1% of discretionary spending. So that means that the executive branch is the other 99%. Not advocating for major changes, I'm just wanna point that out because most people don't get how what the differences are there. Some of these subcommittees make sense, the defense subcommittee, homeland security subcommittee. At the same time, there are different agencies that are brought together in a seemingly artificial way, such as the commerce justice and science subcommittee, for example, why did we do that? I don't remember exactly, but they're there that way. And you need to know that because you need to know which agency to go to, which accounts to look at. So you need to know these 12 subcommittees, those 302B allocations and who has jurisdiction. Again, and Angela's gone through some of this. What I wanna point out is those bullet points that are up there are slightly deliberate in that one of the first part of that, that's what the executive branch does. And then the sort of the arrows are what happens on the Congress side. So there are cycles that are happening simultaneously. As I said, the president gives the State of the Union, it's in January, but it's gonna be at the beginning of February and then after that, the budget is submitted. So these cycles are happening at the same time. And one of the differences is on the executive branch side and the budget committee and the budget offices of the various agencies, Congress is dealing with one budget typically at the same time, agencies are dealing with multiple budgets at the same time. So as you get into some of this, where you're looking at July, federal agencies are beginning to formulate the next fiscal year. Congress may be thinking about FY24, well the federal agencies are starting to think by FY25 and they're gearing up and they're trying to prepare things for their debates with OMB because at the end of the day, OMB is the one, the president's one through OMB that makes those decisions. So I just kind of wanna make sure you're understanding those various cycles that are happening, both in Congress and as well as within the executive branch. It has been the case certainly that there have been individual appropriations bills that have been enacted by September 30th. This is much less common these days. There are a period of time now where there were some mini buses and now it has moved on much more to what is known as the omnibus approach which often stretches in December. And then when the fiscal year 2022 approach was ultimately enacted in March of 2022. So that took a couple more months. So for those of you who are a staff, you may be asking like, so how does this affect me? What is this something that I need to be aware of? These are ways that you and your office and primarily thinking about personal offices here but it doesn't involve if you might be on a committee of jurisdiction also to be involved in this process. So it's sort of offer a couple ideas to you. First of all, your office should think about being involved in submitting requests to the preparations committee member priorities and the committees are the ones they put out deadlines. They indicate what they're looking for and that has not happened yet because there's still sort of a little bit of a delay in the process for this year. The three most important things to be aware of in terms of making those types of requests are you're making a funding request, a report language request or a bill language request. They are slightly different but the appropriations committees will indicate that as you're trying to put ideas forward to do that. Another opportunity too is sort of what they're known as multi-member letters. A member of Congress may start a letter on an important topic and then other members can sign on to that as well. So know that your member can make individual requests through letters to the appropriation subcommittees or they can often also lead or sign on to some of these multi-member letters. Additionally then is after that the oversight process. So the federal agencies come up for Congress and they have to testify on behalf of their budget. So that can be the secretary, it could be another senior official. They go before the authorizing committees of jurisdiction on the House and the Senate side, they usually do one budget hearing and then they'll go before the appropriation subcommittees. So depending on what committee your member serves on is an opportunity to be able to ask questions at those various hearings. To be honest, it's sometimes hard because you get five minute question rounds. You have to think about two or three questions to get in during that time period. An additional opportunity is questions for the record. Those are questions that are submitted to the agencies for them to respond to afterwards. But also sometimes it's uncertain when those questions are gonna come about. But the oversight process, budget process is another opportunity. Following on and this again is to just be honest that the appropriations bills have not really been on the floors. The Senate process, the appropriations bills did not get debated on the floor in the last two cycles and not as many House bills have but there are ways to put forward amendments and hopefully that continues to improve over time. So the floor debates. And then finally, there are various ways that if an idea is in the President's budget that has actually more power than if it doesn't exist and you're trying to push it into an appropriations bill. So letting the executive branch know through the agencies and other means that this is an idea that is important, those, if those ideas get added into the President's budget request that definitely it exists and you're advocating on behalf of it rather than trying to get it added to that fiscal year cycle. So again, sort of thinking about what is important for an office. Making sure you have a good organizational system. We are beginning what is now that we're more back in person to fly in season. Organizations tend to have a lot of their events in Washington say through February through about May. A lot of constituents may wanna be coming in and meet with you and learn and expressing their interests and priorities. Knowing the deadlines and requirements for the appropriations process, those haven't come out yet, but those are really important to know what time to meet. There are the programmatic requests as well as individual member requests. Both of those are important. We happen to talk about that more. Obviously knowing which subcommittee to go to, keeping your constituents up to date about what's going on. That can be some of those online newsletters or things like that. And then at the end of the day, whenever some bill is passed into law and your boss pushed for it, making sure you highlight those in the various social media or other means. Well, often this seems confusing and it's like, how do I learn about where I find things? This is kind of a rundown kind of along the calendar is when the of different documents you need to know about. So the president's submitting the budget request. Congressional justifications are basically just the individual agency breakout of the unified federal budget, the budget committee resolution and the 302A and 302Bs. In addition to that, what the subcommittees have and there are subcommittee marks and full committee marks. And then the omnibus examples, which when it becomes an omnibus, the reports change name and now becomes called a joint explanatory statement. Happy to answer questions, but I just wanted to give you a little bit of insight for that standpoint. That was a great presentation. I saw a lot of people break out their pens on Franz's resource slide. It's great that you wanted to write that down, but we also have the slides available today. The slides will be posted online at esi.org. So if you'd like to go back and look at any of, oh, thanks. Actually, I guess Molly's gonna do her, but if you wanna go back and revisit Franz's slides, Angela's slides, you wanna compare the academic version of the process and the reality version of the process, you can put them side by side. And also there'll be some additional materials there too that we'll be linking to. And if you wanna go back and watch the presentations themselves, we're usually able to post the webcast pretty quickly. And then a little while later, we'll have some summary notes. So if you didn't, if you feel like maybe you missed something here in the moment, no problem, we've got you. Our third panelist is joining us remotely and that's Molly Reynolds. Molly is a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. She studies Congress with an emphasis on how congressional rules and procedures affect domestic policy outcomes. She's the author of the book, Exceptions to the Rule, The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the US Senate, which explores the creation, use and consequences of the budget reconciliation process and other procedures that prevent filibusters in the US Senate. Molly was actually a panelist on climate camp two years ago talking specifically about budget reconciliation. She's a great expert on that. I recommend go back and check out that briefing if you'd like to learn more. Her current research projects include work on oversight in the House Congressional Reform and Congressional Budget Process. She also supervises the maintenance of Brookings' long running resource on the first branch of government, Vital Statistics on Congress. Molly, this is the moment of truth. I'm gonna turn it over to you remotely and I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thanks for joining us. Thanks everyone for inviting me to be with you. I apologize, I cannot be there in person, but I don't know if there are other parents of young children in the room, but I have one who is a germ vector, and so here we are today. What the ESI folks have asked me to do today is to provide a little bit of context for this shaping this year's budget and appropriation process. And so I'm gonna talk about kind of three things, both separately, but you'll see as I talk about them the ways in which they relate to one another. So I'm gonna talk about divided government. I'm gonna talk about the debt limit and I'm gonna talk about changes in Congress over time. So first to talk a little bit about divided government. So one thing that we know from the past several decades of Congress's experience with the discretionary appropriations process is that the combination of small majorities and we live in an era of small congressional majorities, the Republicans currently enjoy a five seat majority in the House, that's about the same size as the Democrats majority was in the House in the last Congress. Last Congress Democrats had an even 50-50 tie in the Senate. Now, as Senator Sinema continues to organizationally associate herself with the Democratic caucus, they have a 51 vote majority, but we have small majorities and we have really polarized parties. So the parties in both chambers are quite far apart from one another. And when you put these things together, especially but not exclusively in the Senate, you end up with a situation where it's really difficult to adopt individual appropriations bills on the floor of the Senate. When the Senate wants to consider appropriations bills, it's really attractive to party leaders to do them either all in one omnibus package or in several say mini-bus packages because it is difficult to build those coalitions in an era of small majorities and the filibuster and polarized parties. We also right now have divided government and we have a particular flavor of divided government with the House controlled by Republicans, the Senate controlled by Democrats, a Democratic president in the White House and that produces just really different spending priorities across that set of actors. And here I wanna talk a little bit about some relevant previous experiences. First in 2011, where we had the same configuration we had a new House Republican majority that had been fueled by the Tea Party wave in 2010. Again, that wave was much larger than the wave we ultimately saw in 2022 but there are some similarities with kind of a resurgent new Republican House majority. In 2011, House Republicans initially tried to play hardball on some continuing resolutions in early 2011 for ultimately coalescing around a position where they were going to insist on debt ceiling, any debt ceiling increase would be matched dollar for dollar by spending reductions in the 10-year budget window. Ultimately, the negotiations in 2011 produced what's known as the Budget Control Act which capped discretionary spending and created what we now refer to as the super committee which tried and failed to produce additional deficit reduction. The two parties I think learned really different lessons from this experience. On one hand, I think Republicans saw it as one of the few times where they really sort of held out for change and got something. We can sort of debate the long-term consequences of the Budget Control Act but I think Republicans see it one way and I think Democrats see it as an example of why you should not let Republicans take the debt limit hostage. I will say from an institutional perspective it's also a really important reminder that budget agreements are only as good as the political will that remains to enforce them starting in 2013, we periodically raised those Budget Control Act discretionary spending caps. So I think it reminds us of what is necessary to enforce tough budget agreements. I mean, 2013, we saw similarly divided government house controlled by Republican Senate still controlled by Democrats and in May of 2013 we saw sort of the suspension of debt limit expire, action was needed by October because action was needed by mid-October that put the resolution of the debt limit increase on roughly the same calendar as keeping the government open. Folks may remember that when the fiscal year ended on September 30th, there was no agreement in place to keep the government open and we had a partial 16 day partial government shutdown and then the deal to ultimately reopen the government also addressed the debt limit because again, those two issues ended up tied in time. So I talked about the debt limit a couple of times. I wanna talk about it a little bit more explicitly now and just first note that the federal debt has always been subject to limits, the modern debt limit which is the statutory overall limit on federal debt has been in place since 1939 and it's the legal maximum amount of debt the government can accrue. As the level of debt approaches the ceiling the Treasury Department prepares to use what we call extraordinary measures. These can push back the date by which action Congress is needed but not forever. There are major consequences for actually breaching the debt limit. These include making it harder for Treasury to borrow and really bad consequences in global financial markets because actors are worried that the U.S. will not pay its bills and a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. A default on the debt would trigger much bigger consequences than what we might call an ordinary government shutdown. This is many more payments beyond just those to say federal employees and grantees would be in danger. And again, it is the case that sometimes we've seen fights over discretionary spending get linked to a fight over the debt limit. I mean, 2011, the way out of the debt limit crisis involved this agreement on cuts to discretionary spending. And again, in 2013, the timing of needing to keep the government open and needing to address the debt limit meant that those negotiations got linked. We've seen some reporting that suggests that Republicans this year may actually try and bring the two deadlines together and perhaps do some short-term addressing of the debt limit over the summer, such that then putting the debt limit on a path to be linked to the end of the fiscal year. But it's really important to note that the debt limit is about fulfilling promises already made. And while there have been efforts to cut discretionary or mandatory spending in exchange for votes to raise the debt limit, the debt limit is fundamentally about past spending choices, not future choices. So we can see these two things get linked politically. We can see them get linked by the calendar, but conceptually they're not as linked as sometimes. And I think people try and make them. The last thing I want to talk about is change in Congress over time. And here I mean, literal change in the humans who serve in the two chambers. In the House, about 30% of Democrats and about 22% of Republicans were in Congress for that big 2011 debt limit fight. In the Senate, it's about half of Democrats, about 35% of Republicans. If you include sort of the next two years, and look at 2013 and 2014, you get slightly higher numbers, 43% of House Democrats were here in that period, about 30% of the House Republicans, about two thirds of Senate Democrats and about 43% of Senate Republicans. And I point this out because it means sort of two different but important things. One, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle, we have fewer of the kind of old guard members who may have had very strong preferences about lower discretionary spending in some areas, but often had very strong preferences about higher discretionary spending in some areas, particularly on the defense side of the budget, and were fundamentally interested in getting and having a functional appropriations process. Here, I'm thinking about folks like Richard Shelby, the recently retired top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. So there are fewer of those individuals in still in the two chambers. And then also there are relatively few individuals who were actually here to kind of learn the hard lessons, especially in 2011, of what can happen when there is a hostage-taking involving the debt limit and really what those consequences are. So I will stop there. And I think I will stay on for questions if the technology is in our favor. I don't want to jinx it, but the technology seems to be in our favor. We heard you loud and clear, Molly, and we saw your slide. So thank you very much. We're going to turn to, oh yes, please. Molly deserves an applause. Hopefully you can hear the applause. It's rapturous for those of us in the room. We're going to turn now to Q and A. My colleague, Allison, has a microphone and she'll come around. While people are putting their questions together, I'm going to toss one out to get us started. And at ESI Briefings, we like to ask questions that all of our panelists can have an opportunity to answer. And so I'm going to direct this one at Franz first, and then I'd love to hear from Angela and from Molly as well. And it's about, oh, I left my, I only had like four words written down. I should be able to remember it. Something called earmarks. So this is something that when I worked in the Senate, 20 years ago, earmarks were a really big thing. And then they kind of went away for a little while and now they're kind of back. And I'm curious, Molly in her presentation talked a little bit about how things have changed. And I'm curious, Franz, if you could say a few words about maybe how the resurgence of earmarks or the return to earmarking might affect the process this year and how maybe that's a little different than maybe it was in some of the years that Molly's outlined. And then Angela, if you have anything you'd like to offer and Molly, same goes for you too. I'm very interested in hearing what you have to say. Hello, okay. Thanks, Dan. Sure, I'm happy to cover that a little bit. There's a lot of aspects to this question. So Dan mentioned earmarks in the house side, it's called community project funding and the Senate side, it's called congressional adjournment spending. And it's been put back in place for the last two years. So in the 117th Congress, essentially at the end of the day, this is about article one authority. This is about congressional authority over the President's budget request. For about 10 years, there was a moratorium on this and then it was brought back in the 117th Congress. And the argument for taking it away was it was gonna help reduce the deficit, reduce costs. And so that really wasn't the case because the deficit definitely increased over that same period of time. One of the aspects that I think is really powerful is if we can touch on this just briefly because I've mentioned those subcommittees. 99% of that goes to the executive branch and then half percent to legislative branch and half percent to jitter cherry. So this is not additional funding on top of the 302A. This is a small amount of funding within the executive branch among that 99%. Essentially it's also been now capped at 1%. So it is a 1% within that amount that would otherwise go to the executive branch to make. So members of Congress were able to make decisions that are beneficial to their districts and to the various constituencies within that. Additionally reforms have been made to that process that have addressed a lot of the concerns that some critics had of that. So for example, members of Congress have to sign letters saying that they themselves members of their family don't have any direct interest on the House side. Members only make up to 15 requests. The GAO has been asked to do a review of that process for fiscal year 22 and 23. And then also no for-profit entities can apply. And so that's been banned. So there's a number of reforms have been put in place. It is a understanding that that will continue in the 118th. There may be some additional reforms we'll see about that. But the Senate, my understanding is the Senate and the House are planning to go forward with that. And so it is in parallel with what I've mentioned, programmatic funding that is funding that would generally go to the agency or those accounts. And in this case, in parallel members can make their own individual requests that are on top of that. So that explains a little bit more. Thanks. Angela, curious if you have anything to share on the topic then Molly will go to you. Sure, I can just give one example. Just continuing with like, what does this look like for one agency in one subcommittee? So for EPA, for example, in last appropriation cycle, the quote unquote earmarks meant that for EPA only there was over a hundred different line items that were passed as earmarks. And millions in dollars. And for like I said, what I was mentioning, kind of you can see what are the congressional priorities. Most, I would 95% of them were for waste and wastewater and on drinking water infrastructure projects. So this is where what are the priorities and how that gets reflected in what the appropriations are. So there were specific projects in specific districts for these water projects that ended up through this earmarks process. Molly, please feel free to jump in. Yeah, I think that the one thing I would add just on top of what Fran said Angela have already said is that one question that people often have about earmarks is to what degree to they sort of grease the wheels for the overall appropriations process. And I tend to be a person who thinks that historically they were sort of moderately helpful but their abolition was not the cause of the breakdown in the appropriations process. That said, I do think that at the end of last year there was some sense that when the debate was between do we finish an omnibus or do we resort to a full year continuing resolution? The idea that if the default was to a CR meant that no one would get their community projects funded. Again, I don't want to say that that played a huge role in driving the omnibus to completion. But I think we should, there are some interesting questions to be asked and answered about the role of earmarks in trying to create a functional appropriations process in what passes for a functional appropriations process in the current political environment. Thanks, Molly. And anyone in our online audience is welcome to ask a question as well. You can send us an email. The email address to use is AskASK at EESI.org. I'll keep an eye out for questions in the room. Oh, we have a question there. The gentleman in the yellow shirt. I know him, he's a gentleman. You can take my word for that. Thank you. Tim Under with the National Association of Energy Service Companies. When a continuing resolution is passed it seems like we more and more happen to have. How does that affect the agency's spending? What impact does that have on them when they get those? Angela, would you like to take this one first and then we'll maybe hear from Franz and Molly? So the language of the CR will specify at what rate that spending will be. So for example, the last two CRs, it was equal to the operating rate at the previous fiscal year. So what that means is the agency will has, can obligate funds at the same rate it did last year with the anticipation that that money will be put through, but it doesn't change any future or past appropriations. So it depends partly on the language in the CR and sometimes it will say for this, except for this agency or this account or this program. But generally, agencies will, in recent history, it's been that they can spend out at the same rate that they have been. Franz? Sure, I just add to that. It is very hard on federal agencies when they're the sort of continuing resolutions over time they've gotten used to this, but it is hard to do longer-term planning until you actually really know you have your new budget. There are some aspects that are often included in a CR and those are called anomalies. These are minor adjustments as needed for federal agencies that wouldn't be spending exactly at the previous fiscal year rate. So just know that there's often something called anomalies in there. So it's become a pattern in practice that agencies have gotten used to, but having say one, two, three months CRs is hard for the longer-term planning at federal agencies. Molly? Yeah, just to add to what Franz was just saying, in addition to making it harder for agencies to plan, it just generally creates uncertainty about what is likely to happen for agencies and in situations where we're dealing with a series of short-term CRs and there's real conflict about whether another CR will be adopted in order to avoid partial government shutdown that then often also will require agencies to devote resources to planning for a potential shutdown that they would not otherwise have to devote to that task if they weren't worried that there was not going to be action before the expiration of a continued resolution. I think, oh, we have another question in the wall. Allison's making her way over to you with the microphone. I always sort of think about it as it's getting off to a late start, but the end date is still the same and it just puts a lot of time pressure on the agencies to get spending done, especially, you know, yeah. So yeah, it's not a great way to go, but obviously it's something we have to live with. Would you like to ask your question? Hi, my name is Aidan Lillianfeld from the Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun. My question is we hear a lot about the budgets and debt levels, deficit, spending, whatever, but I almost never hear about the government's income, like how much the government makes. Is the funding and appropriations at all tied to how much the government made from presumably mostly tax revenue that year or is that just like a completely separate calculation? This one can be a free-for-all. Would anyone like to weigh in? So the president is the one that determines what the budget looks like when it's submitted to Congress and they do calculate what the revenues are versus the outlays and there definitely have been greater expenditures than incomes, I guess it's not a question specifically for appropriations how much is spent based upon what the income is because there is a unified budget which also includes the mandatory side which is at least two thirds of the overall budget while appropriations is one third of that budget. So all of that has to be taken into consideration. Yeah, and if we just want to sort of think about like how these concepts fit together what in particularly in sort of the framework that I laid out before about past versus future spending choices, the how much money the government takes in in a given year, the gap between that and the spending that goes out the door both as the result of the discretionary appropriations process and then as Franz was just saying through the mandatory spending, the gap between those two amounts is what creates the annual budget deficit which the Treasury Department that has to borrow to make up the difference and then the debt is the accumulation of that borrowing over time. I think we have another question on the other side of the room so Allison will make her way over, thanks Allison. Thank you, Byron Callan, Capital Alpha Partners. You know, you talked about authorizations and appropriations. How often do the two actually line up particularly when you talk about a multi-year authorization and annual appropriations? Is there any data that says these split up exactly? Are there some variants or some pattern that might come out historically that you could point to? Angel, this one feels like you. Yeah, I don't have, you know, data or study analysis, you know, at my fingertips to explain that but do keep in mind when, you know, these annual discretionary appropriations is money going into the bank and agencies often spend over multi-years so like a super fund project will clean up can go on for 20, 30 years and so each year the agency is taking in money getting some tax receipts, you know, having different expenditures, different kinds of expenditures so it's a little difficult to line up. You know, there's not a parallel between, you know, it was authorized and appropriated money for this year and that's how much got spent although we do get a lot of questions about, you know, where's this money that has been authorized, you know, for the next five years and, you know, and where's it gone? It's a, it can be a little tricky to sort of get that full picture. Go ahead, Frans. Yeah, I think that's one of the fun challenges of the Congress in terms of what is the connection and but also the disconnect between authorizing and appropriations and that is that I'll use anecdotal example because this is the climate camp. There was major energy legislation in 1992 followed by 2005, 2007 and then 2020. I know there's been other authorizing bills that have been passed in between that but those would be four major energy authorizing bills. Those don't directly align with the appropriations process, they can influence it but in many, many, many cases the amount that was intended to be on the authorized side or a specific idea cannot be fulfilled in appropriations. So it's the intention that is not always there. Whether that's, you know, say for example, the energy and water subcommittee or the EPA, interior EPA subcommittee or those types of things that might be relevant. So it is kind of challenging for someone to fully understand the differences of the authorizing versus the appropriations process and both are important, especially on the oversight side but at the end of the day where the rubber hits the road is appropriations. Molly, would you like to weigh in with a response on this one? No, I think Angela and Franz covered it really well. One thing we were talking about sort of as we were getting ready for today was on the Senate side, there's only a hundred members on the House side, it's a much larger institution and so there's a lot more potential for overlap between authorizers and appropriators on the Senate side than on the House side and that creates all sorts of issues for personal offices but also for committees and I'm not sure whether there's any data to suggest that that encourages function or dysfunction but sort of just the reality of the numbers. I'm scanning around the audience for in-person question or for another in-person question. I think we might have had one on the other side. Did you have a follow-up, sir? Oh, Allison's coming around with the mic. Oh, okay, sorry. So back up following up my budget question about how it affects the agencies, when you have a House and Senate that are two different parties, those marks that come out are often wildly different and that's not often reflected in the continued resolution. How that seems to affect agencies as well is sort of fear of overspending the mark and then getting a lower budget than the continued resolution gave you? Well, the federal agencies would not be able to spend beyond their authority from the previous fiscal year and the continuing resolution would be usually at the same amount for the fiscal year so they're not gonna, the intention is that they would not overspend until they actually have the money in hand. They actually cannot do that. So if they had a higher amount in the next fiscal year, they're not able to adjust for that until it actually has been enacted and signed by the president. Thanks for that. We're gonna move to, Molly, did you have, I'm sorry, or Angela? We're gonna move to another question but I got a good one from our online audience that we'll do first and this is gonna get to something that we were thinking about trying to get to. The question is sort of, how can an administrative rule be affected by appropriations? And the gist of the question is if Congress doesn't want something to happen in the executive branch, can they use the appropriations process to squash it, their words not mine? It's a really important issue. Curious what our panelists have to say about sort of what kind of potential there is for that. And Molly, I'm happy to start with you if this one if you'd like and then we can hear from Franz and Angela in the room. Sure, I suspect that Franz in particular may have some concrete examples and experience of this but generally, yes, what we would refer to the kind of thing that the question is asking about as a form of limitation writer. So basically we can and do you see in individual appropriations bills whether they're past the standalone measures or together in an omnibus language that basically says that a federal agency cannot use funds to write promulgates, finalize all kinds of things, certain federal regulations. They're, when I teach about this, there's an example that I use from the FDA in the aftermath of the passage of the Affordable Care Act involving the FDA's menu labeling rule where color accounts have to be displayed on fast food menus. That was the subject of one of these writers at one point. And so it is something that can happen. We do see it. And I think writers in general are a place where we're seeing consistent high levels of conflict in the appropriations process, particularly between the parties. And if you think back to 2018, which was both the most productive appropriations year in more than a decade, there were several bills actually finished before the start and signed into law before the start of the fiscal year and the year that brought us the partial government shutdown of record length 36 days. One of the things that in the Senate really helped get that process moving as smoothly as it did was a sort of commitment by both sides of the aisle, basically not to advocate for new writers, not to try and really pick fights about them. So that is a way that we can see this dynamic that the questioner is asking about. Great, thank you, Molly. Thank you, Molly. Do you have a couple of responses from other panelists? Yeah, so that Molly hits the heart of it, which is they're called writers. And often you may hear a comment being made like we would like to pass a clean bill. And a clean bill means that just sort of focusing on the appropriations to the federal agencies. The greater challenge has been over a period of years that because of the limitations in the authorizing process and sort of the continuing oversight in that process. Appropriations bills have carried policy language, usually is in what are called general provisions or GPs. And so in a way, those are a form of a writer, but they have been accepted. But as Molly has pointed out, no funds provision is, no funds can be spent to do X, Y, or Z. And those have been debated when there is divided government especially. Democrats did have writers in bills that were opposed by the Trump administration too. So it goes both ways. It's not just one way. And sometimes they can be successful and sometimes they get stripped out in the negotiating process, which would be with the White House in power saying, we're gonna vote for a bill unless these things are taken out. So it is a negotiation. Angel? Just to give one quick example, I think they did a great job explaining the concept for EPA, for example, in a policy issue I happen to cover. There has been one of these writers in the last several appropriations acts where there's a EPA is prohibited from spending money on a certain collection of greenhouse gas reporting on a certain kind of agricultural facility. And it's a very specific part of a regulation. And so EPA has not issued regulations. And so what it comes down to for an agency is they can't issue regulations, they can't collect information. And then there's just a blank when it comes to data for that particular type of facility within this program as the agency is trying to collect information on greenhouse gas emissions from all industrial sectors of the United States as it was directed by Congress in 2008. Another good example in the climate space that I always think of as the light bulb writer prevented DOE from implementing light bulb standards sort of worked for a while and then ended up not working very well because technology started outpacing what the regulation was even gonna accomplish. But it still caused a lot of headaches and ultimately caused a lot of greenhouse gas emissions to be emitted that probably didn't have to be. We do have a question from someone in the back. So we'll go to you next, thank you. Hi, thank you for all this very helpful information. I'm curious about the opportunities to engage in the appropriations process section, particularly if there are any unique elements in terms of opportunities or in terms of effective timelines for people approaching this from outside of congressional offices. Like as an outside organization trying to influence Congress? Do I can touch on that? And one of the most important things to note the other day and this is for the office as well is knowing what the deadlines are and any other requirements. So that needs to be determined by the committee. As an outside organization, as I mentioned, there are these fly-ins. That's just sort of one way to get information. But certainly you can be in touch with individual members. It could be like, are they on a certain committee? Are they part of a certain delegation, a certain state? And sort of identify what your priorities are and then sort of what you want to weigh on when you have a better understanding what the president's budget request might be and things like that. So often all of that information is sort of inputted through a process that many offices have set up. And then they sort of filter through that. So those are ways to sort of try to understand or try to make that first impact. Those offices can make decisions to accept or modify or reject that. And then those can be part of member requests that then go or submitted to the Appropriations Subcommittee. Angela, Molly, any comments from you? ESI briefings are educational. We're not here to advocate, but one thing I learned the hard way when that was my job is that not to assume that subcommittees operate the same or even structure their reports the same. Interior is different than energy and water. They're different than agriculture. And so understanding the proclivities of the subcommittees is really important. And even on the House and Senate, oftentimes there's disagreements about how to approach things. And for a while there was even different tolerances of report language just generally, whether or not it was even appropriate to go ask for. So there's a lot to learn about this process. Climate camp in some ways is just dipping our toes into the water because it's a big one. Go ahead, Frank. Building on what Dan said, one of the fun things in terms of I think about these 12 subcommittees, they're like siblings. They're co-equal and they all have different personalities. You have some really big kids and you got some small kids and you got kids with different personalities. So as Dan indicated, definitely take it into what the context is and what's their jurisdiction because they do have different personalities. And it is possible to approach those subcommittee staff with your ideas. You don't just need to submit those letters and submit those requests as staff and be considerate, but you can approach them and sort of explain what your priorities are for that given year. Thanks, Ronson. So I'm keeping my eye out in the audience, but I have another question of something. Molly's slides sort of talked about the 2011 and 2014 example. Something else that's happened since then, a couple of things called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act. And I'm curious from our panelists, what are some ways, the fact that those pieces of legislation have been enacted, both of those pieces of legislation involved many, many billions of dollars, sometimes new programs, sometimes existing programs. What are some of the effects that staff people should be on the lookout for that those bills are making possible? And Molly, if you'd like to go first on this one, I'm happy to defer to you. Otherwise, we can hear from Frans and Angela. Sure, I'll just offer some really sort of brief observations. So taken together, the IIJA and the Inflation Reduction Act contained some pretty significant additional discretionary funding for a number of different agencies and programs of interest to, I think, the kinds of folks in the audience, both at the EPA, at DOE, that sort of thing. Some of that funding was for fiscal year 2022, some was also in advance appropriations for FY 2023 through 2026, the exact sort of distribution tends to vary across agencies and programs. I'll say in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act, specifically, so that's the reconciliation bill that was passed in August of 2022. That bill contains some funding that I think we should think of as in other circumstances, funding that would have otherwise been handled through the discretionary appropriations process. So without going too far down into the weeds, there are ways to take funding that one would generally address through the discretionary appropriations process. So through the appropriations committees in both chambers and sort of dress it up as mandatory spending to make it permissible to be acted on in the reconciliation bill. And so for a long time, we didn't see a lot of that of sort of using reconciliation to allocate funding that kind of would have otherwise been handled through the discretionary appropriations process in large part because it was a real like jurisdictional store point between the authorizing committees and the appropriations committees. But then in 2021 and 2022 in particular, we basically reached a point where Democrats holding extremely narrow majorities in both chambers and a Democratic president saw a reconciliation which can't be filibustered in the Senate as they're kind of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They're kind of one neat trick to get things done. And so we saw in both the American Rescue Plan in 2021 and then also in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 in the climate space and beyond sort of the use of that legislative vehicle to do some things in the appropriation space that I think we would not have seen in earlier decades. Franz or Angela, any other comments? Great, okay. Looking around for any final questions, we are unfortunately at about the end of our time today and apologies for getting a bit of a late start but we'll do our best to end on time. So I know people have a busy day ahead of them. Oh, we do have one more. We can make an exception. Okay, fair enough. Hi, I'm Liz Telley. I'm actually from the Wildlife Conservation Society. It's a conservation nonprofit, but within that we run the Climate Adaptation Fund. So I am very curious total Padawan level actually at how these two bills will impact my work and the grant partners work who we fund. So I love to hear a little bit more about what Molly just said about like dressing this up as mandatory spending and therefore using this reconciliation process to understand is the appropriations phase a place where or to what extent will this money be influenced in how it's spent or once it goes through states and agencies is more of that termination happening once the money goes through the appropriations process. And I'm sorry if my question reveals a lot of ignorance and it's hard to answer, but thank you. Molly, would you like to say a few more words about what you mean by dressing up? I think I was able to hear the question. And the short answer is I don't have a great answer. I think that again, because it's not something that we've seen as much as used as heavily historically, we just don't quite know kind of what Congress will try and do. But I do, and I think it's also helpful to remember that now we're like in a period of divided government. So anything that gets agreed on it's gonna have to have bipartisan support. But I do think it's also important to remember over the sort of medium term as long as the filibuster exists for other legislating in the Senate, where are the places where Senate majority is under unified party control are gonna try and push the reconciliation envelope, if you will. And I think we'll just have to wait and see. Any other fronds or Angela? Well, thank you again for that. And thanks for the extra question at the end. That was a great way. We are at the point now where we'll conclude the first installment of Climate Camp. I have to say huge thanks to our tremendous panelists Angela, Franz and Molly. Molly, I hope everybody's feeling better soon. They deserve a round of applause for being just the best. So thank you so much for being here today. Also like to say once again, a very special thanks to our friends in Senator Van Hollen's office. Couldn't do it without Song and Mia and Shelby. So thank you very much for helping us get the room today and for just being generally agreeable sorts and just always a pleasure to work with. So thank you very much to them as well. I am just, oh, Savannah. Well, I also know Shelby. So Savannah too. Sorry about that. Also like to say great thanks to everyone on Team ESI who makes today possible. We've got Daniel Bryan up here. We've got Omri, Molly, Allison, Savannah, Miguel, Emma, our intern Tyler first week gets to be at a briefing which is always very cool. They're really the ones who do sort of all of the hard work to pull in these briefings together. Anna, who's not with us today. John Michael, everybody. Lots and lots of work goes into this. One of the, I also wanted to sort of mention them because if there are any donuts left over, they get to have them. The rule was only leftover donuts. So help me keep the donuts away from my colleagues. Take one on the way out. I think there might even be some napkins and some plates. If you have a kid or someone who needs a donut tonight, take one with you. And then we'll allow our, my colleagues to have them. But thanks to everybody. Thanks also to Linley and Madel and our other two interns for doing a great job. Today's climate camp number one, two weeks we'll be back for climate camp number two. That one's gonna be all about public attitudes and polling and sort of how those have changed over time. Then we'll be back two weeks after that for non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, learning all about the wide range of pollutants and things that we pump into the atmosphere that contribute to climate change. So that's gonna be a really great one as well. And then coming back to the idea of IIJA and IRA, we'll be talking with some great panelists about the status of the implementation of those bills. That'll be March 9th. That's the last briefing of the series. And then we'll be back. We'll do all sorts of great briefings, including a whole bunch on the farm bill, which I know is gonna be, everyone's gonna have to be a farm bill expert in a couple months. So our briefings will be ready for when that happens. The last slide, oh, do I have control of the slides? Where is it? There we go. The last thing, everyone in our online audience, everyone in the room today, this is a link to a survey. We read every response. It's a great opportunity for us to get feedback about how the briefing went today. Again, apologies for the little bit of a late start, but we figured it out. And it was really great to be able to have Molly join us today, given the circumstances. But if you'd like to take the survey, if you have any ideas about briefing topics or if there are any audio or technical issues, please let us know. It really does mean a lot when you take a moment or two and share your feedback. I think that about does it. Oh, I'm sorry. Curtis and Catherine, our videographers, our friends at C-SPAN who will be broadcasting this out. Thank you so much for joining us as well. They handle all of the webcasting and all of that great stuff. And we couldn't do these briefings for our broader audience without them. So thank you very much as well. We'll go ahead and wrap up. Thanks again to our panelists. I hope everyone has a great rest of your Thursday and we'll be hanging out here for a few minutes, hopefully over a donut and love to meet you and hear how things are going. So thanks so much and we'll end there. Thanks.