The Department of Energy’s fiscal 2020 budget bill remained in legislative limbo in the Senate on Wednesday, after an essentially party-line fight over President Donald Trump’s planned southern-border wall.
The motion to invoke cloture — a Senate parliamentary move that limits debate on a bill — failed 51-44, with only two Republicans voting no. One of those Republicans was Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who changed his vote for procedural reasons so he could again attempt to invoke cloture.
Democrats, in the Senate minority, opposed ending debate because doing so could have cleared the way for a vote on GOP-authored legislation with funding for the wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Cloture nominally limits debate on a bill to 30 hours. If invoked on the so-called minibus package that contains DOE’s funding for the budget year beginning Oct. 1, the full Senate could voted on the bill Friday or early next week.
As part of a nearly $50 billion energy and water bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee last week proposed $16.9 billion for DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs. The DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM), which cleans up shuttered nuclear-weapon sites, would get just under $7.5 billion.
The Senate committee’s proposed NNSA budget is nearly 10% higher than the agency’s 2019 budget, nearly 2.5% more than the $16.5 billion the Trump administration requested, and nearly 6% higher than the roughly $16 billion the full House has recommended for 2020.
For Environmental Management, the Senate committee bill proposed nearly 3.5% more funding than the 2019 budget of roughly $7.2 billion and almost 15% more than the White House requested for Cold War cleanup. The House also recommended some $7.2 billion for EM in fiscal 2020.
The Senate bill, like the House measure passed in June, zeroes out the Trump administration’s request for funding to resume licensing of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
Amid the partisan filibustering over Trump’s proposed border wall, the full House is set to vote either Thursday or Friday on a stopgap appropriations bill that would keep agencies operational at 2019 funding levels into November. This kick-the-can bill would buy legislators more time to compromise, if they wish, on unified 2020 spending bills.
Late last year, similar partisan fights over Trump’s border and immigration policies precipitated the longest partial government shutdown in decades, after the president rejected compromise spending bills that did not provide his desired level of border-wall funding.
