WASHINGTON -- Congressional leaders have an agreement to fully fund the Great Lakes cleanup this year at $300 million, and to boost spending on medical research.

This doesn't mean they've successfully beaten back President Donald Trump's attempt to zero out the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The deal Congress unveiled early Monday finalizes expenditures for the rest of the 2017 fiscal year, and Trump's request to eliminate all of the lake cleanup money was part of his budget proposal for 2018, not this year. It is still alive.

Still, the president in late March asked for a smaller immediate cut to the Great Lakes initiative, paring $50 million in 2017. While the smaller cut was still seen as unlikely by Congress, the fact that Congress insisted on full funding Monday was important symbolically, sending a message to the president that lawmakers from both parties want to continue cleaning up the Great Lakes -- and keep their commitment to spend $300 million a year doing so.

"Investing in Lake Erie means investing in local jobs and ensuring clean drinking water for Ohio," Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said in a statement.

If approved by both houses of Congress, as may occur by Friday when a short-term spending bill expires, this spending bill through September would still rebuff Trump on other fronts. Trump wanted immediate cuts to the National Institutes of Health, for example, so he could boost spending on defense in 2017 and start paying for a wall to keep immigrants from entering illegally from Mexico.

Instead, the spending bill boosts NIH's 2017 budget by $2 billion, while providing an extra $15 billion for defense spending and $1.5 billion for technology and repairs of existing fencing on the Mexican border -- but no wall.

While many Democratic members of Congress said they were pleased the bill doesn't change existing spending priorities, conservatives such as Champaign County's Jim Jordan said they're unlikely to support it.

In a Monday morning interview on CNN's New Day, Jordan said he's displeased it includes funding for Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities, but not the border wall that Trump promised to build. He said Congress decided to postpone the final funding bill until Trump took office so "we could actually do the things we campaigned on," but the bill doesn't seem to do that.

"I think you're going to see conservatives have some real concerns with this legislation," said Jordan.

The 2017 fiscal year began last Oct. 1 but Congress never was able to agree on how to spend money for it, instead passing a number of short-term bills that maintained spending at 2016 levels. With this bill, moderate and liberal Congress members from Ohio say the state and nation will benefit numerous ways. They include:

A provision in the bill that requires the Army Corps of Engineers to abide by Ohio's environmental decisions on where it will dump sediment dredged from the Cleveland Harbor and Cuyahoga River shipping channel. The Corps had wanted to dump it in open Lake Erie water, saying it was safe and cheaper to do so. Ohio said it worried about toxins and wanted the sediment placed in lakefront dikes. While the two sides are waiting for a federal judge's ruling on their dispute, they are

Provisions to spend nearly $700 million on programs already authorized for fighting opioid abuse and addiction treatment -- and then adding $150 million more, according to Sen. Rob Portman's office. "This is good news for Ohio, and will help our efforts to combat the heroin and prescription drug epidemic gripping our state," Portman, an Ohio Republican, said in a statement.

An extension through September of the EB-5 investor visa program, which has let wealthy foreigners and their immediate families gain residence in the United States

A $2 billion spending boost for the National Institutes of Health, which should help Cleveland medical institutions continue their research into cancer and other diseases. While Trump wants to cut NIH's budget by $5.8 billion next year, he also had requested a shorter-term cut this fiscal year of $1.2 billion.

Permanent

A block against the Justice Department spending any money to keep states including Ohio from implementing their own laws that authorize medical marijuana use, distribution, possession or cultivation.

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