Congress appears ready to vote this week on the final version of the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2019 budget bill: a proposal that includes more funding than requested for both active nuclear weapons programs and Cold War cleanup.
Although they have not scheduled the votes yet, the full House and Senate are set to approve the compromise “minibus” spending bill covering DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a number of other federal agencies, according to Monday press releases from the chambers’ Appropriations committees.
The White House had not issued a statement of administration policy, an official note about whether the president might sign or veto the bill, at deadline Monday.
Under the bill, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would receive $15.23 billion, or $138 million above the request, for its active weapons, nonproliferation, and Naval Reactors programs. The increase will “address the backlog of deferred maintenance at aging nuclear weapons facilities,” according to a House description of the conference bill. The semiautonomous DOE agency will also get $65 million to start designing and building a new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead.
The proposed fate of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was unclear at deadline Monday. The House proposed continuing it, while the Senate proposed canceling it, as the White House requested. A conference report released Monday evening did not mention the controversial plutonium-disposal program by name. However, it did provide $25 million — a bit more than half the funding requested — for the NNSA to begin design work only on an alternative plutonium disposal method called dilute and dispose.
Meanwhile, the DOE Office of Environmental Management, which oversees cleanup of Cold War nuclear weapons sites, would receive $7.2 billion: $53 million more than in 2018 and $578 million more than the White House requested for the budget year that starts Oct. 1. That would include $310 million for non-defense environmental cleanup and just over $6 billion for defense environmental cleanup.
Apart from, but related to, the Department of Energy, the bill would forbid the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board from implementing a board-approved plan to shrink the independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog to about 80 full-time employees from the current 100 or so. The board announced the restructuring Aug. 15. New Mexico’s Senate delegation, among other people, opposed the plan. The agency would get $31 million in funding.
he Besides the Department of Energy’s 2019 budget bill, the minibus includes proposed spending for the legislative branch and military construction and veterans affairs.
