Senior Department of Energy officials will defend their fiscal year 2024 budget requests before Senate appropriators on Wednesday.
Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk will be joined by National Nuclear Security Administration head Jill Hruby to testify before the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. in Dirksen Senate Office Building room 192 and will be streamed live on the committee’s website.
The Biden administration’s funding request for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 includes $52 billion for the Department of Energy in 2024, about 13.5% more than the 2023 appropriations Congress provided in December in an omnibus spending bill.
DOE’s nuclear weapons and nuclear-waste cleanup programs make up the single largest part of the agency’s budget.
For nuclear weapons programs at the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) the White House seeks $23.8 billion for 2024, up about $1.5 billion from 2023.
The NNSA would be the only part of the DOE nuclear portfolio to get a raise if Biden’s proposed budget, which House Republicans have already criticized in stark terms, becomes law.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which cleans up shuttered nuclear-weapons production sites, would stay flat under the 2024 request. The request contains a record $3 billion or so in annual funding for cleanup of plutonium production infrastructure at the Hanford Site in Washington state, about $300 million more than last year.
Meanwhile, funding for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which includes programs intended to help with civilian nuclear-waste management, would drop more than 10% under the request to $1.56 billion in fiscal year 2024.
