Partisan politics on Tuesday again prevented progress on the short-term spending bill Congress must pass by midnight Friday keep the federal government, and its various defense and civilian nuclear programs, open through Dec. 9.
The Senate could not muster the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture, or curtail debate, on the legislative language for the so-called continuing resolution that would fund the Department of Energy until Dec. 9 at an annualized level of roughly $29.5 billion. Senate Democrats, behind whom the motion fell by a vote of 44-55, remained largely united in their demand that the stopgap include relief funding for lead-contaminated drinking water in Flint, Mich. — something majority Republicans have not been inclined to provide in the continuing resolution.
After the vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) quickly entered a motion to reconsider cloture, keeping alive the possibility the Senate will pass a spending bill in time to get it to the House for a vote, and then on to the White House in time to avert the second government shutdown since 2013. Fiscal 2017 begins on Saturday.
Within the 2016 budget is the annual equivalent of about $6.1 billion for the cleanup of mostly Cold War nuclear waste managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. That comes out to a monthly rate of just under $510 million: roughly 1 percent more than the level the White House asked for fiscal 2017 in the budget request it released in February.
Within DOE’s Cold War nuclear cleanup programs, uranium enrichment remediation at the agency’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, and Paducah Site near Paducah, Ky., would be explicitly spared from de facto cuts under the continuing resolution, according to the stopgap budget numbers unveiled by the Senate Appropriations Committee last week.
It is not yet certain how other DOE defense nuclear programs slated for budget increases in the coming fiscal year would fare; Congress has yet to release the customary report that typically accompanies spending bills, and which explains any budgetary puts and takes lawmakers want the administration to make within an agency’s total budget.
Under the 2016 budget, DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages nuclear weapons production for the Pentagon, would be funded under at an annualized $12.5 billion, or roughly $1 billion a month: a rate about 3 percent less than the administration requested for 2017.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates commercial nuclear power plants and their associated waste streams, would be funded at an annualized rate of just over $1 billion, or about $83 million a month. That is equivalent to roughly 2 percent more annually than the White House asked for 2017.
