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WASHINGTON—The White House Wednesday said it strongly opposes a House bill that would delay several Environmental Protection Agency rules on air pollution, setting up another showdown over Republican-led efforts to postpone the agency's agenda.

Though it stopped short of an explicit veto threat, the White House said in a statement that the president's advisors would recommend a veto of the bill, which the House is expected to debate later this week. Also Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved legislation that would require EPA to stop moving forward with rules for air pollution from cement plants and industrial boilers and revise them within 15 months. Those bills are expected to reach the House floor later this fall.

In part, the Republican efforts are meant to send a message. In a tough economy, Republicans will fault Democrats who vote against the bills, saying they are not willing to stop regulations that may force factories and power plants to close or lay off workers.

But if enough Democrats show support for postponing the various EPA rules, it would bolster the efforts of industry groups to delay them. The stand-alone measures being debated now are not likely to be considered by the Democrat-controlled Senate, but the issues could come up again as part of separate negotiations on federal spending levels for 2012.

Industry groups argue the EPA rules aren't feasible and will cause facilities to close down.

"Investments required by these rules are irreversible. For those businesses that cannot make those investments, and decide to stop producing their product at a particular location, the job losses are irreversible," Rep. Morgan Griffith (R., Va.), who introduced one of the bills approved by the Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement.

But supporters of EPA say the industry is overstating the costs of the rules and ignoring the fact that tough standards will help prevent asthma and other lung conditions. Public health groups and their allies in Congress said Wednesday they are preparing for another round of the fight to protect EPA, following a victory in keeping provisions to postpone EPA's agenda out of the 2011 budget.

"We prevailed then and we must prevail now," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Sen. Boxer was flanked by other Senators, public health advocates and a family with an asthmatic child at a press conference. "We are drawing a line in the sand here," she said.

The bill expected to come up in the House this week would create a cabinet-level committee to study the cumulative impact of EPA rules on employment, power grid reliability, gasoline prices and other metrics —a response to Republican criticism that the agency is not fully accounting for the cost of its actions. It would delay several air pollution measures, including rules affecting industrial boilers, until at least 2013, while the committee's report is finalized and reviewed. House Republicans are also poised to add more provisions to the bill that would push back rules to control mercury and other pollutants from power plants by several years.

The White House, which overruled the EPA last month and delayed a rule limiting smog pollution, said the extra analysis proposed by House Republicans was redundant and unnecessary. "While the administration strongly supports careful analysis of the economic effects of regulation, the approach taken in (the bill) would slow or undermine important public health protections," the White House statement said.

The bills approved by the Energy and Commerce Committee would delay EPA rules regulating air pollution from cement plants and on-site generators, or boilers, used at commercial and industrial facilities. They would force EPA to take an extra 15 months while it evaluates the feasibility of those rules and give companies five years to comply. A handful of Democrats supported each measure.

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