Federal

Colorado officials have agreed to pay Nebraska $4 million to settle old claims that their state violated a water-sharing compact involving the Republican River. The settlement requires Colorado to make the payment by Dec. 31, 2018, even though state officials did not admit to any violations of the Republican River Compact. Colorado legislators must approve the funding before the deadline, or the settlement will become invalid. [node:read-more:link]

EPA administrator has been under fire for first-class travel and luxury hotel stays.  As questions about the official travel habits of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt mount, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is demanding documents and other information on his first-class flights, as it looks into whether federal laws were broken.Pruitt has for several months been under fire for incurring high travel costs at taxpayer expense. [node:read-more:link]

EPA administrator has been under fire for first-class travel and luxury hotel stays.  As questions about the official travel habits of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt mount, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is demanding documents and other information on his first-class flights, as it looks into whether federal laws were broken.Pruitt has for several months been under fire for incurring high travel costs at taxpayer expense. [node:read-more:link]

Rosetta Davis said she had not planned on publicly sharing what she alleges are the most intimate and painful details of her 16 years working for the Agriculture Department. But after hearing department officials praise the work environment at USDA during a Black History Month event last week, she said she felt compelled to speak. Before an audience of USDA employees in Jefferson Auditorium at USDA headquarters, Davis said she was fed up by what she described as years of sexual harassment and retaliation by senior management in civil rights offices. [node:read-more:link]

nterior Secretary Ryan Zinke is pressing ahead with a massive overhaul of his department, despite growing opposition to his proposal to move hundreds of public employees out of Washington and create a new organizational map that largely ignores state boundaries. Zinke wants to divide most of the department’s 70,000 employees and their responsibilities into 13 regions based on rivers and ecosystems, instead of the current map based mostly on state lines.The proposal would relocate many of the Interior Department’s top decision-makers from Washington to still-undisclosed cities in the West. [node:read-more:link]

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s ongoing blockade against Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey’s appointment to the U.S. Department of Agriculture could do lasting damage to his standing in the first-in-the-nation caucus state and perhaps imperil a future run for president, several leading Republicans said this week. [node:read-more:link]

The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) in Washington, D.C., has filed amicus briefs in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court involving state limits on food products sold based on animal care, the group said in a news release. Both cases — Missouri, et al. v. California and Indiana, et al. v. Massachusetts — push back on state laws in California and Massachusetts that limits the types of meat and eggs that can be raised or sold within their borders. [node:read-more:link]

Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) are promoted as the solution to keeping sleepy drivers off the road, even if the load is livestock. That sounds simple on the surface, but ELDs are being used as control tools for unrealistic regulations.  Under Federal rules, after a maximum of 14 hours of time in the truck (11 hours of driving), truckers must take a whopping 10-hour sleep break! [node:read-more:link]

New legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that would exempt farms from reporting air emissions. [node:read-more:link]

“We lose a lot of money with Canada. Canada does not treat us right in terms of the farming and the crossing the borders,” he said at a White House event on his new infrastructure proposal. “So they’ll either treat us right or we’ll just have to do business a little bit diff… really differently,” he said. “We cannot continue to be taken advantage of by other countries.” The Canadian government has disputed Trump’s frequent claim that the U.S. “loses” money on trade with Canada. [node:read-more:link]