The Obama administration Feb. 1 issued a proposed $12.2 billion fiscal year 2011 budget for the Interior Department that stresses increased efforts to promote renewable energy, sustainable water supplies, and coping with climate change.
The proposal also would boost the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program of financial assistance and federal land acquisition that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar strongly supports.
To counterbalance many of the planned spending increases, the budget includes more than $668 million of “reductions, terminations, and discontinuation of unrequested congressional increases”—earmarks that Congress added to past budgets and that it may not prove willing to remove. ...