The House and Senate Appropriations Committees have released the fiscal year 2014 omnibus appropriations bill that combines all 12 regular appropriations bills into one package to reduce the number of votes lawmakers need to take to set funding levels across the federal government. A stopgap spending bill will move to avoid a government shutdown before the omnibus itself is up for a vote. This omnibus would be the first bill in years where Congress has deliberately tweaked and set spending levels – spending for the last few years has generally been on autopilot with “continuing resolutions” simply extending prior fiscal year funding levels.

Sunday, December 22 will mark the fifth anniversary of a massive spill of coal ash in Tennessee that destroyed homes and spilled 1.1 billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres. This event sparked intensified calls for the regulation of coal ash, a waste by-product produced when coal is burned. Federal efforts to deal with the problem of coal ash have progressed slowly, but a recent court decision ordered the U.S.

Public contract money continues to flow to some corporations that have repeatedly put their own workers at excessive risk, even to companies where workers have died on the job, according to a report issued last week by the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee.