Salazar, Murkowski head to Alaska ahead of spending bill fight

Senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar are heading to Alaska ahead of efforts to craft spending legislation for the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), the top Republican on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies subcommittee, said next week’s travels with subcommittee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Salazar will be wide-ranging.

It will include visits to Fairbanks to discuss Bureau of Land Management issues, the state’s northern coast, and Denali National Park, she said. “It is going to be a little bit of everything. It is going to be a good trip,” Murkowski told reporters in the Capitol Tuesday.

The Interior Department oversees big swaths of federal land in Alaska through the BLM, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement that’s in charge of offshore drilling.

An Interior Department official called the reasons for Salazar’s visit broad.

"Secretary Salazar will visit Alaska next week to hold discussions with key stakeholders about safe and responsible energy development in the Arctic Ocean and onshore, and meet with Alaska Native leaders to continue this administration’s progress in strengthening the United States’ government-to-government relationship with Alaska Natives and American Indians," the official said.

Murkowski has frequently clashed with federal regulators that she argues have placed undue roadblocks before energy production on federal lands and offshore.

House Republicans, in the fiscal year 2012 Interior-EPA spending bill before that chamber, have included provisions that would mandate faster EPA air-pollution permitting for offshore projects in Alaska, where Royal Dutch Shell has long been pressing EPA and Interior to sign off on drilling.

But Murkowski and other Republicans have far less ability in the Senate to attach policy provisions to spending bills.

The fiscal year 2012 appropriations cycle will be the first under the spending cuts mandated in the newly minted debt-ceiling deal.

It begins phasing them in by requiring $7 billion in total discretionary spending cuts, and the cuts grow substantially later into the 10-year horizon of the agreement.

Lawmakers will have little time to reach agreement on spending bills with the start of fiscal year 2012 looming Oct. 1. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he expects an omnibus package rather than passing individual spending bills through the floor.

"It probably will be difficult to have a normal appropriations process. They'll have to be clumped together," he said in the Capitol.

“It would be hard to move 12 bills across the floor in the month of September,” McConnell said.

—This post was updated at 3:17 p.m.