‘Fiscal sanity’: GOP House budget proposal emphasizes US energy production

FIRST ON FOX: The House Republican Study Committee (RSC), which is tasked with guiding GOP policy on key issues, issued its lengthy 2025 budget proposal, which has a special emphasis on shoring up domestic energy production.

The RSC’s budget, titled, “Fiscal Sanity to Save America,” includes sweeping energy policies that the group said would help unleash America’s “vast reserves of energy and mineral resources.” Pursuing such policies, they said, would reduce inflation, promote job creation, and decrease dependence on foreign oil, while assisting allies seeking to reduce reliance on adversaries for energy needs.

“The future of our nation is dependent on our ability to strengthen our domestic energy supply,” RSC Chairman Kevin Hern, R-Okla., said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The Biden administration has dismantled and destroyed all the progress we made under President Trump.”

“Our budget attacks the Biden agenda head-on, unleashing American energy production to lower costs for Americans and end our dependence on foreign adversaries.”

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Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., conducts a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol with House Republicans in November 2021. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The budget proposal includes a multipronged approach to energy, rolling back environmental regulations, promoting greater oil and gas production, curbing executive agency regulatory powers, cutting so-called “wasteful” programs, reversing some of the Biden administration’s climate policies, nullifying vehicle emission rules, and boosting mining production.

Overall, the RSC budget endorses dozens of bills that would help achieve its energy production and regulatory goals. 

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For example, it includes the American Energy First Act, put forth by Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., which would reform the onshore and offshore energy leasing and permitting processes to reduce delays. It also endorses the Energy Permitting Certainty Act and Utah Republican Rep. Blake Moore’s Promoting Energy Independence and Transparency Act, both of which streamline energy project permitting.

Other bills included in the budget would restore the Keystone XL pipeline’s permits, support continued operation of the Line 5 pipeline in Michigan, block the creation of the carbon tax and allow states to develop on federal lands within their borders.

Rep. Ben Cline, the RSC’s Budget and Spending Task Force chair, is pictured on May 23, 2023. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“President Biden’s energy policies represent a direct assault on America’s energy independence, crippling our economy, inflating energy costs, and undermining the livelihoods of hardworking American families,” Rep. Ben Cline, R– Va., the RSC’s Budget and Spending Task Force chair, told Fox News Digital. 

“Our budget has commonsense solutions that bolster American energy independence and support American workers, not restrictions that make us dependent on foreign adversaries.”

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In addition to policies boosting energy production and promoting pipeline projects, the RSC budget includes a wide range of bills that would further prevent the president from declaring a national “climate emergency,” prevent federal bans on natural gas stoves, repeal green energy subsidies in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, and reform the current federal critical mineral permitting process.

President Biden is pictured next to an oil drilling rig in a photo illustration. The Biden administration has repeatedly taken aim at oil and gas production since taking office in early 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | Sergio Flores/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The budget finally lists a series of clean energy and climate loan programs that the Biden administration has created, which the RSC would seek to defund. And the budget would also curb funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

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“The Biden Administration is working to implement the most radical environmental agenda in the history of the country,” the RSC budget states. “These regulations will cost jobs, reduce wages and force middle-class Americans to pay higher prices for energy.

“This budget would significantly reduce the EPA’s funding, rolls back the regulatory excess of the Biden Administration, and returns the agency to its much more limited original purpose,” it adds. “This will save the taxpayers billions of dollars per year while significantly reducing wage-lowering regulations.”

While the RSC budget provides a conservative counter to President Joe Biden’s recently-unveiled budget, it remains unclear the extent to which its proposed policies will be adopted in future spending packages.