The 16th secretary of energy is scheduled to face the Department of Energy’s congressional appropriators in an open hearing for the first time today, with the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee set to hear testimony on DOE’s so-far incomplete 2022 budget request at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
The Joe Biden administration has yet to announce its detailed federal funding request for fiscal year 2022, but it did produce a so-called skinny budget in April, which calls for a $46 billion DOE budget. Overall, the first Biden budget would boost non-defense spending by around 16% year-over-year to some $769 billion while upping defense spending by a little more than 1.5%, to roughly $753 million.
Together, the nuclear weapons programs managed by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the legacy nuclear-weapons cleanup managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management made up some 60% of the parent agency’s 2021 appropriation.
In Granholm’s written testimony for Thursday’s scheduled hearing, what detail there is about nuclear weapons and waste programs at DOE was relegated to the penultimate paragraph of the final page.
The Biden budget request “supports a safe, secure, and effective nuclear stockpile, and a continued modernization program. This includes the recapitalization of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) physical infrastructure and essential facilities to ensure our deterrent remains viable,” Granholm’s testimony reads. The 2022 budget also “sustains our investment in the Environmental Management mission to clean up World War II and Cold War nuclear sites.”
The Biden administration remains in the middle of a closed-door review on U.S. nuclear weapon policies, during which high-level officials have essentially been banned from talking about the fate of DOE and Pentagon nuclear modernization efforts.
