Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) issued the following statement on House passage of H.R. 3354, the Make America Secure and Prosperous Appropriations Act of 2018:

“This package builds on the administration’s efforts to reduce bureaucracy and promote regulatory certainty across the Department of the Interior and other federal land management agencies.”

H.R. 3354 includes policies and funding to:

• Authorize wildfire suppression at the 10-year average for both the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS)
• Increase USFS’s National Forest System Hazardous Fuels account to mitigate wildfires hazards and lessen the likelihood of catastrophic fires
• Provide $465 million for Payments in Lieu of Taxes
• Accelerates the reclamation of abandoned mine lands to boost environmental cleanup and economic growth
• Remove recovered gray wolves from the endangered species list
• Prohibit the use of funds to change the status of sage-grouse as a threatened or endangered species
• Reduce funding for federal land acquisition to prioritize state and local recreation opportunities and battlefield preservation
• Prohibit USFS or the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from issuing new closures of public lands to hunting or recreational shooting
• Restrict funding from being used to implement BLM’s unlawful “Waste Prevention, Production Subject to Royalties, and Resource Conservation” otherwise known as the venting and flaring rule
• Prohibit the regulation of lead content of ammunition and tackle
• Prohibit funds for implementing the Obama Administration’s Social Cost of Carbon