Republicans in the House are loading the 2012 spending bill for the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with dozens of policy riders that would hamper efforts to protect our health, air, water, and wildlife.

Add this to the list of the nation’s current budgetary woes: according to Bloomberg news, the Treasury is losing about $30 million a day, or close to $200 million a week, because Congress has allowed the Federal Aviation Administration’s congressional authorization to lapse and, as a result, Treasury isn’t collecting taxes on airplane tickets. The House of Representatives is trying to ram through a provision that will make it harder for aviation workers to unionize, and the debate is holding up the latest in a long, long line of short-term extensions of the FAA’s authorization. Although it has been extended twenty times since it expired in 2007, Congress failed to re-authorize the FAA by July 22, meaning Treasury no longer has the authority to collect airline taxes. To add insult to injury, airlines have used this as an opportunity to raise their prices and reap more profit from consumers.

Conservative members of Congress are not being very helpful in the debt ceiling debate. The Republican-led House of Representatives earlier this week voted through their "solution" to the problem in the form of the so-called “Cut, Cap, and Balance” bill. But the House likely only voted on the bill because they couldn’t get enough votes for the bill conservatives actually wanted: a balanced budget amendment filled with conservative policy goals. But with the Senate unlikely to pass the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill, Congress might turn to the next worse alternative: a plain balanced budget amendment.

Health and safety advocates have argued for decades that investments in clean energy and environmental protections help to create jobs. Time and time again, reports have shown that supporting clean energy fosters the development of new, job-creating industries, and that compliance with environmental health and safety standards encourages companies to hire new workers and invest in local economies. A host of new studies published in the past week provide even more support for those claims.