Word: bille
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...innovation hubs - enough for one center. Meanwhile, Congress is pushing the Energy Department to spend more than $200 million on hydrogen-based clean-fuel technologies - an idea that was popular with President George W. Bush but that many energy experts deride as a permanent pipe dream. Another House bill would have the Energy Department spend $30 million a year for five years on natural-gas vehicles, even though the Obama Administration hasn't sought the money and few experts believe natural gas is a smart fuel. (Watch TIME's video "The Truth About Wind Power...
...White House strategic approach on energy legislation has also involved significant compromises that Obama has glossed over. Last month, Obama greeted the passage of a House energy bill with great fanfare, calling it a "bold and necessary" step and a "victory of the future over the past." He did not mention that the price of getting enough Democrats on board with the legislation was significant compromises of his previous pledges. During the campaign, Obama had proposed auctioning off carbon permits (for companies that weren't yet sufficiently energy efficient) and using that money for other green programs. But the final...
...last week of July, news leaked out of Capitol Hill that the President's proposal for a so-called public option on health care was unlikely to make it into the Senate Finance Committee bill. As recently as June, Obama had told a gathering of doctors in Chicago that there "needs to be a public option" in the health-care-reform bill, to help control insurance costs. But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has declined this week to say whether Obama is still fighting for a public health plan over the alternate proposal for a "co-op," which would attempt...
...White House set this pattern of legislative compromise and public celebration early on. During the debate over the stimulus bill, which passed just weeks after Obama took office, the President and his advisers deferred significantly to Congress to both shape and size the bill. In the end, the legislation was trimmed to $787 billion, with about $70 billion going to a temporary fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax, an annual adjustment with little stimulative impact...
...time, the President did not call for a larger bill, despite warnings from a wide range of economists that more funding would be needed, given the precipitous deterioration of the economy. Now, however, there is a growing sense in the White House that more stimulus is indeed necessary, even though the political environment for further action has soured. "Given what we know now about how sick the economy, it turns out, was getting, probably bigger might have been better," a senior White House official admits. "It was always an issue, of course, of what could you get through Congress." (Read...