A must-pass bill that would authorize even more than the requested funding for Department of Energy nuclear weapons and waste programs could get its first vote in the House today or Tuesday and clear the Senate later this week, a congressional aid said.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would authorize DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration to spend about $20 billion in fiscal year 2021, which started Oct. 1, and allow the agency’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) to spend about $5.8 billion on its single-largest funding line, defense environmental cleanup. That’s almost $850 million more than the request for EM, but still a cut from 2020’s appropriation of $6.2 billion.
President Trump has threatened to veto the NDAA, which sets spending limits and policy for defense programs at DOE and the Pentagon, for reasons unrelated to nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, or defense programs. Although even Senate Armed Services Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has urged Trump to sign the bill, it was not clear at deadline Monday whether House and Senate leadership could muster the two-thirds majority vote necessary to override a veto.
As with every year, the House and Senate approved very different NDAAs. However, even before the bicameral conference negotiations that produced the unified bill released late last week, both chambers’ Armed Services Committees agreed to authorize the NNSA to spend about $20 billion.
On the other hand, the compromise NDAA authorizes more spending than either the House or Senate alone preferred for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. The White House again proposed a cut for EM, and while the House’s NDAA proposed adding back $790 million to defense environmental cleanup, the Senate’s NDAA called for restoring only about $100 million. The unified bill goes beyond either, and well beyond the Senate’s proposal.
On a conference call Thursday with reporters, House and Senate aides said there appeared to be bipartisan support for the bill in each chamber of Congress. These staffers declined to speculate about what might happen if Trump vetoes the bill.
If the NDAA doesn’t become law in the next several weeks, it would delay among other things a proposed change to the way the NNSA formulates its annual budget request. The 2021 bill would let the joint Pentagon-NNSA nuclear-weapons council say, before any DOE budget goes to the White House for final inspection, whether the secretary of energy’s proposed NNSA budget is adequate to meet military needs.
Under the 2021 NDAA, If the council determines the NNSA request is not adequate, it would trigger an automatic notification to Congress when the White House submits its annual budget request to the Hill.
Authorization bills such as the NDAA do not provide money for federal agencies. That happens under appropriations bills. At deadline Monday, the entire federal government was operating under a stopgap budget bill that froze spending at 2020 levels because Congress and the White House could not pass permanent spending bills by Sept. 30.
Editor’s note, 12/08/2020, 2:00 p.m. Eastern: the story was corrected to read that if the Nuclear Weapons Council determines the secretary of energy’s proposed budget for the NNSA is inadequate, the White House must include that determination with its annual budget request to Congress.
