The White House is expected to release its fiscal 2018 budget request on May 22, leaving only about a month-and-a-half worth of work days for Congress and the Donald Trump administration to reach an accord on federal spending for the budget year that starts Oct. 1.
The full budget request was slated to drop May 15, but the White House pushed the date back a week, according to a source in Washington. There are just over 90 days between the rumored budget drop and the end of the 2017 fiscal year, but Congress will be in recess for about half of them.
In a limited budget blueprint released in March, the administration proposed $28 billion for DOE: about 9 percent less than what the agency would receive under the 2017 omnibus spending bill Congress is voting on this week. The 2018 request includes almost $14 billion for the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), along with $6.5 billion for its Office of Environmental Management.
The NNSA budget would be about 7 percent more than the semiautonomous nuclear weapons agency would receive in the fiscal 2017 omnibus spending bill expected to be signed by Friday. In addition, Trump’s blueprint proposed making the NNSA exempt from the the across-the-board budget cuts contained in the Budget Control Act of 2011: the law that caps federal discretionary spending through 2021, and which created the dreaded budget sequester that in 2013 indiscriminately sucked billions of dollars out of civilian and military programs.
The Environmental Management office, meanwhile, would see its highest inflation-adjusted budget in 10 years, though the Trump administration has hinted the funding might be used to transfer some unneeded NNSA facilities over to EM for cleanup.
The blueprint did not include a proposed fiscal 2018 budget for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates the nation’s nuclear power plants and the waste they produce. The independent agency would presumably receive a share of the up to $120 million Trump has proposed spending next year to resume DOE’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste.
The NRC has responsibility for processing the application, which was filed in 2008 but withdrawn by the Obama administration in 2010. That responsibility includes including litigating more than 200 technical contentions the state of Nevada filed against the application: a process industry watchers estimate will take between two and five years.
