This week, Administrator Lisa P. Jackson testified before both the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the U.S. House Appropriations Committee on EPA’s fiscal year 2012 budget.

In her testimony, the Administrator emphasized the important role EPA and the environmental safeguards the Agency enforces play in protecting America’s health and revitalizing our economy. If Congress cuts funding for those safeguards, she said, there will be “more asthma attacks, more missed school and work days, more heart attacks, more cancer cases, more premature deaths, and more polluted waters.”

President Obama’s proposed budget takes a responsible approach to our fiscal challenges by making some painful, but necessary, cuts. Reductions to EPA’s budget were carefully considered to sustain the agency’s core mission and maintain the programs needed to, as Administrator Jackson said in her testimony, keep “American children and adults safe from uncontrolled amounts of harmful pollution being dumped into the water they drink and the air they breathe.”

The Administrator highlighted several programs in the budget that are vital to preserving the American people’s health. These included improved monitoring of dangerous air pollution and actions to reduce chemical risks in our products, along with providing the public with greater access to information about toxic chemicals in their homes and communities.