Hill Heat

Full committee markup.

06/24/2026 at 11:00AM

Across the United States, communities are already facing worsening climate impacts during “Danger Season”—the period between May and October when extreme heat, drought, flooding, wildfires, and storms hit hardest.

And these risks are being made worse by the Trump administration’s destructive agenda that is undermining our ability to forecast, prepare, and respond to climate and extreme weather disasters.

The Union of Concerned Scientists invites you to a Danger Season Action Hour on how the Trump administration’s attacks on crucial climate science and resilience policies are putting people at risk—and what you can do to fight back.

Date: Tuesday, June 23 Time: 7:30–8:30 p.m. ET

From dismantling federal climate research programs to cutting funding for agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency, recent Trump administration actions are eroding life-saving science and disaster preparedness programs. At the same time, rising energy costs and economic pressures are leaving families less able to cope with climate extremes.

At this event, UCS climate resilience expert, Shana Udvardy, will explain:

• How attacks on climate science and resilience policies are undermining our ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from climate and extreme weather disasters; and
• What these changes mean for your community.

Campaign Manager Kate Cell and Senior Organizer Shabd Singh will explain:

• How we can hold decision-makers accountable; and
• Actions you can take right now to protect science and public safety.

RSVP

06/23/2026 at 07:30PM

We’re calling on FIFA World Cup, sponsored by oil giant Aramco, & other teams to drop their fossil fuel sponsorships.

Join us at a stadium near you on June 21!

Pick your stadium from this list & we’ll send you details.

City/Sport/Stadium/Sponsor

Boston/Foxborough, MA: FIFA World Cup, Gillette Stadium (Aramco)

Miami: FIFA World Cup game at Hard Rock Stadium (Aramco)

Los Angeles: Dodger game at Dodger Stadium (Phillips 66)

Los Angeles: FIFA World Cup game at SoFi Stadium (Aramco)

Seattle: FIFA World Cup, Lumen Field (Aramco)

Atlanta: FIFA World Cup game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium (Aramco)

Philadelphia: FIFA World Cup, Lincoln Financial Field (Aramco)

SF Bay Area: FIFA World Cup, Levi Stadium, Santa Clara (Aramco)

Kansas City: FIFA World Cup, GEHA Field/Arrowhead Stadium (Aramco)

Dallas: FIFA World Cup, AT&T Stadium (Aramco)

Houston: FIFA World Cup, NRG Stadium (Aramco)

East Rutherford, New Jersey: FIFA World Cup, MetLife Stadium (Aramco)

Vancouver, Canada: FIFA World Cup game at BC Place Stadium (Aramco)

Mexico: FIFA World Cup, Guadalajara, Mexico City & Monterrey (Aramco)

Toronto, Canada: FIFA World Cup, BMO Field (Aramco)

Portland, OR, Portland Timbers, Providence Park (Bank of America)

Sacramento, Sacramento Kings, Golden 1 Center (BP, Shell)

Cleveland, Cleveland Guardians, Progressive Field (Marathon Petroleum)

St. Louis: St. Louis Cardinals, Busch Stadium (Phillips 66)

Arlington, TX: Texas Rangers, Globe Life Field (Energy Transfer)

06/21/2026 at 10:00AM

On Friday, June 12, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. (CDT), the Committee on Natural Resources will hold a legislative field hearing on a Discussion Draft of the “Great American Outdoors Act 250.” The hearing will examine legislation reauthorizing and reforming the Great American Outdoors Act to enhance public access, improve infrastructure, and create new outdoor recreation opportunities in one of our nation’s crown jewels – Hot Springs National Park.

This hearing will be held at The Arlington Hotel, 239 Central Ave., in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

06/12/2026 at 10:00AM

Representative Ro Khanna, Congressional Candidate Wala Blegay, Christian Nunes of Equality Bound Solutions, and Mitch Jones of Food and Water Action join PDA’s Alan Minsky to discuss the threat posed by unregulated data centers.

These enormous industrial facilities are driving up energy costs, using up scarce water resources, and threatening neighborhoods. Find out what we can do to protect ourselves from this looming menace.

RSVP

06/11/2026 at 11:00AM

The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs will meet in open session to conduct a hearing entitled, “AI and the American Dream: Promoting Innovation, Affordability, and American Dominance.”

Witnesses:

• Mike Flynn, Senior Vice President and Counsel, The Information Technology Industry Council
• David Feith, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
• Will Rinehart, Senior Fellow, The American Enterprise Institute
• Dr. Sarah Myers West, Co-Executive Director, AI Now Institute

Myers West:

In the first quarter of 2026, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft reported spending $130.65 billion in capital expenditures for data centers—71 percent higher than what they spent during the same quarter of 2025. These four companies anticipate spending approximately $700 billion this year. Morgan Stanley analysts project that combined, Big Tech companies will spend nearly $3 trillion through 2028, but only generate half of that amount in cash. To finance this buildout, tech companies are taking on an increased amount of debt: in 2025, big tech firms issued $121 billion in new debt, but this number is anticipated to balloon in the years to come: Morgan Stanley is estimating debt issuance will top $500 billion this year. … Private equity firms are key conduits for the vast amounts of capital going into data centers. In 2025, private equity investment into data center transactions/deals reached $45 billion.

OpenAI is on the hook for over a trillion in deals with other AI firms and chipmakers, including a $300 billion deal with Oracle for its compute infrastructure, $250 billion with Microsoft for its Azure infrastructure (which includes Microsoft’s 26% return ownership share of OpenAI); $38 billion to rent access to Amazon Web Services servers, (a deal which could expand under a revised structure), $22 billion with CoreWeave for use of its data centers, a deal with Google Cloud, a “strategic partnership” to deploy 10 gigawatts of AI data centers with Nvidia (in return for Nvidia’s $100 billion investment into OpenAI), a multi-billion dollar chip deal with AMD (a deal that enables OpenAI to take a 10% ownership stake in AMD), and a partnership with Broadcom to develop and deploy chips that OpenAI would design.

The revenue needed for the industry to break even is becoming astronomical: a widely cited study from Bain estimates that $2 trillion in new revenue is needed by 2030 to fund the current AI scaling trend.

Last month, after burning through its entire 2026 AI budget in only four months, Uber’s COO asserted the costs of AI were getting harder to justify because they were not translating into useful customer features. And Uber is not alone: a June 2026 Bain study found that nearly 40% of companies said their cost reductions from AI were significantly less than expected. More troubling, 44% of companies based their next wave of AI investments on previous rounds of savings—savings that have consistently come in below expectations.35 As the study put it, “self-funding the next wave from past returns sounds like discipline. In reality, it is a circular bet with a structural leak.” Scaling revenue may be further challenged by delays in data center construction: recent reporting in the Financial Times found that 40% of data centers planned for 2026 are delayed, further increasing financial risk at the level of individual firm bets.

An AI bubble burst could wipe out over $20 trillion in American household wealth, three trillion more than the financial crisis.

Private credit companies deploy capital that comes from 401(k) accounts, life insurance plans, and pensions; they’ve made a casino of American workers’ financial security. For example, both New York and Pennsylvania’s state pension plans are invested in Blue Owl’s $7 billion digital infrastructure fund, which in turn has loaned out money to finance data centers for Meta in Richland Parish, Louisiana. If Meta fails to post revenues that justify its planned $125 billion in spending for 2026—a move that led to a 6% decline in its stock attributed to investor anxiety—the effects will be felt across the country.

The subsidies that AI firms have received are extraordinary, ranging from federal backing of a $1 billion loan to bring the Three Mile Island nuclear plant back online to power Microsoft’s A.I. data centers, to offering up $1 billion in AI funding through the Big Beautiful Bill, to allocating federal lands for data center construction, outlining new ‘private public partnerships’ at national laboratories that house treasure troves of genomic data that can be leveraged for commercial use, to its Export AI initiative, which leverages the apparatus of the federal government in support of deal-brokering on behalf of AI firms. Looking at the evidence, a bailout of the AI sector has arguably already begun, before Congress has meaningfully acted to protect the public and the economy from the risks introduced by the industry.

06/11/2026 at 10:00AM

Classified subcommittee markup.

06/11/2026 at 09:00AM

The purpose of the hearing is to conduct oversight of the Colorado River Basin, including its current hydrologic conditions and ongoing negotiations regarding post-2026 operations.

Witnesses

Panel I

• Andrea Travnicek, Assistant Secretary, Water and Science, United States Department of the Interior
• David Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Operations, United States Bureau of Reclamation

Panel 2

• Amy Hass, Executive Director, The Colorado River Authority of Utah
• Mike Vickrey, Rancher, Green River Valley Cattlemen’s Association
• Tom Kiernan, President & Chief Executive Officer, American Rivers
• Bill Hasencamp, Manager, Colorado River Resources, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California

06/10/2026 at 10:00AM

On Wednesday, June 10, at 10:00 a.m., U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, will hold a hearing examining the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) proposed budget for fiscal year 2027.

Witness:

• Brian Nesvik, Director, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

• FWS budget justifications (Green Book)

• FWS budget CRS review

• FWS budget administration overview

The FY2027 funding request includes no discretionary appropriations for five FWS accounts: Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund, National Wildlife Refuge Fund, Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, Multinational Species Conservation Fund, and State and Tribal Wildlife Grants.

The Resource Management account has historically comprised the majority (88% in FY2026) of the FWS annual discretionary appropriation. For FY2027, the Administration request of $1.30 billion is $147.9 million less (-10%) than the FY2026 enacted level for this account.

The FY2027 requested amount for FWS’s Ecological Services activity reflects a $150.4 million increase (54%) from the FY2026 enacted level. This increase is due, in part, to $178.0 million in funding requested for the proposed transfer of Endangered Species Act- and Marine Mammal Protection Act-related work from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to FWS.

For FY2026, Congress appropriated $199.0 million for seven other FWS accounts (i.e., non-Resource Management). These accounts support construction, conservation, financial and technical assistance, and revenue sharing, among other activities (Table 1). For FY2027, the Administration requested $13.7 million for the Construction account (-7% from FY2026) and $10.0 million for the North American Wetlands Conservation Fund (-80% from FY2026). The Administration did not request funding for the other five accounts, citing varying reasons. They included that the funding was duplicative (in the case of the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund) and being reserved for domestic species (in the case of the Multinational Species Conservation Fund and Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Fund).

Among other proposals, the FY2027 Administration request proposed to prioritize funding to expand visitor services and access in the National Wildlife Refuge System; improve law enforcement officer retention; and expedite environmental reviews for energy, mineral, and timber projects. The FY2027 request also expressed support for Congress to reauthorize the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund (54 U.S.C. § 200402) to help FWS (and other agencies) address deferred maintenance. The FY2027 Administration request included some proposals that were previously submitted in the FY2026 request and not enacted by Congress in FY2026. One such proposal seeks to consolidate work of FWS’s Ecological Services program and NMFS’s Office of Protected Resources regarding the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act. Functions transferred from NMFS would be situated in a new Marine Functions subactivity within the FWS Ecological Services program. The Administration stated that this consolidation is intended to reduce redundancies, improve species recovery outcomes, and streamline permitting activities. The FY2027 Administration request is $188.0 million above the FY2026 Administration request. Much of the difference ($178.0 million) is associated with the FY2027 proposal to move certain NMFS functions to FWS. The FY2026 request proposed a similar transfer of functions, but did not specify an associated increase in funding. For FY2026, Congress provided $511.2 million (45%) above the amount requested by the Administration ($1.14 billion) for FWS. Congress did not enact FY2026 Administration proposals to eliminate funding for any FWS discretionary appropriations accounts.

In response to staff reductions implemented by the Trump Administration, in P.L. 119-74, Congress directed FWS to maintain staffing levels in order to fulfill the agency’s statutory responsibilities and implement programs in a timely manner. For FY2027, FWS seeks to continue to restructure the agency’s workforce, as a part of the Administration’s broader actions to reduce the size of the federal workforce. The Administration proposed to reduce the total FWS employee count from 6,513 for FY2026 to 5,861 for FY2027 (a reduction of 10%).

The 2027 budget request for FWS is $1.3 billion. In total, FWS estimates the budget request will support 6,295 full-time equivalents (FTE). The budget includes resources and authorities to transfer the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) Office of Protected Resources and associated Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) implementation responsibilities into FWS.

The 2027 budget increases funding to reduce environmental review timeframes for fossil-fuel projects under the ESA.

06/10/2026 at 10:00AM

Full committee hearing.

Witness:

• Brooke L. Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture, USDA

06/10/2026 at 10:00AM