Effect on Colorado: A look at the impact of the $1.3 trillion U.S. budget bill on the state.»

WASHINGTON» President Donald Trump on Friday approved Congress’ $1.3 trillion plan to fund the federal government through Sept. 30 — and tucked into that 2,232-page measure are several provisions that will have an impact on Colorado. Among them:

New money to fight wildfires

A long-standing concern among Western lawmakers is the way that the federal government is forced to pay for its efforts to fight wildfires.

Too often, the cost has been so much that the U.S. Forest Service has had to raid other programs to cover the expense — including money used to improve forest health and prevent wildfires in the first place.

A move spearheaded by U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner, of Colorado, changes that process by establishing a new emergency fund that can be accessed once the initial firefighting funds are tapped out. That new fund will start at $2.25 billion in 2020 and increase to nearly $3 billion by 2027.

“Because of the pressures that wildfires have brought to the West, as well as the challenges of climate change and development, the antiquated way we pay for firefighting needed dramatic change,” Bennet said in a statement.

Added Gardner: “Our provision will ensure the Forest Service has the necessary funding for cleanup and prevention efforts that will help reduce the amount of catastrophic wildfires the Forest Service has to fight.”

NREL is spared

Once faced with devastating cuts, a research facility in Colorado now looks as if it will emerge unscathed.

The new measure budgets $2.3 billion for a program within the U.S. Department of Energy that provides the bulk of the funding for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.

That’s about $230 million increase from what the Energy Department got the last time and roughly four times what Trump once considered, according to draft documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The threat set off alarm bells in Colorado, as NREL is an economic engine in Colorado.

“NREL provides thousands of good-paying jobs for our community and is an economic engine for our state with an estimated $700 million annual economic impact in Colorado,” U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, DArvada, said in a statement.

A thaw in the gun violence research ban

Congress has effectively barred the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from researching gun violence for more than 20 years, but an addendum to the bill nudges the agency back toward that kind of work.

While it notes the CDC and other agencies still are prohibited from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” the language makes note of the fact that the “Secretary of Health and Human Services has stated (that) the CDC has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence.”

Removing that research restriction has been a longstanding goal of lawmakers such as U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver.

She said the nod to gun control research was “better than nothing” but that she’d rather just remove the congressional barrier, known as the Dickey Amendment.

“I believe in sciencebased public policy,” she said.

Mental health care for veterans expands

Included in the spending package is a provision that requires the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide mental and behavioral health care services to combat service members who were not honorably discharged and to those who experienced military sexual trauma.

This expansion of treatment has been a long-standing goal of U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora.

“It is critical that our men and women in uniform know they can reach out to the VA for help when they come home from a combat deployment,” Coffman said in a statement. “As a Marine Corps combat veteran, I like to live by the rule that ‘we never leave anyone behind.’ ”

No new legal help for recreational pot

For the past several years, Congress has barred the U.S. Department of Justice from interfering in states that legalized marijuana for medical use.

The latest spending bill continues that prohibition, but it does not extend the protection to recreational use — a partial victory for the marijuana industry and Colorado lawmakers such as U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, DBoulder.

They wanted to expand the shield after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in January rescinded an Obama-era policy that generally left alone states such as Colorado that had legalized marijuana.

But they were not able to garner enough support.