Congress adjourned for the week without passing a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government funded at fiscal 2016 levels until Dec. 9, leaving lawmakers only another week to put finishing touches on the bill or risk another government shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) began the week with hopes that the upper chamber by now would have advanced a shell bill that could be modified to host a spending bill that would have extended the current federal top line for another two months.
The shell bill passed the necessary procedural hurdles in the Senate, but the amendment that would add actual spending provisions to the measure got hung up on partisan politics that have nothing to do with the Energy Department’s nuclear problems: Senate Democrats objected that their Republican counterparts added no emergency funding to clean up lead-contaminated drinking water in Flint, Mich.
However, McConnell has scheduled a Sept. 27 vote to curtail debate on the amendment, which would leave enough time to jam the bill through the Senate and then the House and rush it to President Barack Obama for a signature to avert a government shutdown at midnight Sept. 30. The next budget year begins on Oct. 1.
DOE would be funded at an annualized level of about $29.5 billion, if the short-term spending bill becomes law. That would put a squeeze on some agency programs for which the White House had requested an increase, though only for two months, and only then if Congress does not use the authority it has to shift funds around within the total 2016 appropriation to programs that urgently need it from programs that can do without.
Within DOE’s fiscal 2016 budget was some $6.1 billion for the Office of Environmental Management, which manages cleanup of nuclear waste from the Cold War arms race: about 1 percent more than the White House requested for 2017.
However, spending priorities for legacy nuclear waste cleanup from one year to the next were projected to shift as some projects ramp up and others ramp down.
For example, the White House requested an 18 percent cut for funding at the Oak Ridge site, where major demolition of former gaseous diffusion infrastructure is winding down from peak levels after the milestone tear-down of the K-27 building that finished in August. The administration asked for about $160 million, compared with almost $195 million from the 2016 appropriation.
Conversely, the administration sought a 14-percent year-over-year funding increase for decontamination and decommissioning of still-standing gaseous diffusion facilities at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, to about $255 million.
The House and the Senate, where parochial interests contribute to funding proposals that routinely differ both from one another and from the administration’s request, wound up with the Senate proposing about 3 percent more for EM than the House.
The Senate proposed far more funding than did the House for DOE’s Richland Operations Office, which manages cleanup of the Columbia River corridor and Central Plateau at the agency’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The Obama administration requested about $715 million for that work, or a 20 percent cut from 2016.
However, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) bumped the Richland Operations budget to about $840 million, which is about 9 percent below current levels, 17 percent more than requested, and 11 percent more than the House proposed.
The Senate bill would pay for the Richland plus-up by reducing the cleanup budget for DOE’s Idaho Site and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. WIPP, the underground salt mine, is DOE’s only disposal facility for equipment and material contaminated by elements heavier than uranium.
The House’s version of DOE’s budget would have given $382 million to Idaho and $292 million to WIPP in the next fiscal year: respectively, 5 percent and 6 percent more than the Senate bill would provide.
