Brian Bradley and Jeremy Dillon
WC Monitor
10/2/2015
Congress this week passed a continuing resolution that will fund the federal government through Dec. 11 at fiscal 2015-enacted levels and avoids a government shutdown. The CR gives Congress an additional 10 weeks to work toward a budget solution, but with uncertainty in the House following Speaker John Boehner’s recent resignation announcement, there remains no guarantee lawmakers will make any additional progress come December. Appropriations leaders, though, hope to avoid the need for any additional CRs or shutdown threats. “Once again, Congress has had to act on a short-term funding bill to keep the lights on in government,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said in a statement. “This yearly, destabilizing practice is bad for the U.S. economy, bad for the reliability of important government programs – including our national defense – and wastes federal money by arbitrarily postponing actions that make better use of taxpayer dollars. However, this legislation is absolutely necessary, as the alternative – a government shutdown – is reckless and irresponsible.”
The CR includes an anomaly that could head off hundreds of layoffs of workers on the cleanup project at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site in Piketon, Ohio, by tapping into the Department of Energy’s Uranium Decontaminating and Decommissioning (D&D) Fund. Specifically, the legislation authorizes the department to advance ongoing defense cleanup, “particularly at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.” The additional flexibility will remain for the duration of the CR or until the fiscal 2016 budget process is implemented. The D&D Fund covers nuclear cleanup programs at Portsmouth, as well as Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Paducah, Ky.
To help reduce the threat of layoffs last year, the Obama administration had sought an “anomaly” for the fiscal 2015 CR to provide a rate of operations of $664.7 million in uranium enrichment D&D funding. The fiscal 2015 appropriations bill funded the Department of Energy at $27.8 billion, $5.8 billion of which went to the Office of Environmental Management.
