President Donald Trump on Friday signed into law the $2 trillion relief bill to support national recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition to nearly $100 million for the Energy Department’s Office of Science and semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to support research and development to help contain the fallout of COVID-19, at national laboratories, the new law also provides $28 million to support remote access for DOE employees, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said in a press release.
There will also be continued payment for federal contractors and subcontractors who, due to COVID-19, are unable to perform work or telework “because of the nature of their jobs,” Brouillette said in the release.
There are thousands of workers just at the Hanford Site and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, both in Washington state, who cannot telecommute during the crisis, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in his own Friday press release. Hanford had not recorded any confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Sunday evening, according to its website.
While the Energy Department has yet to spell out when affected contractor employees might start receiving paid leave, the Savannah River Site in a weekend press release said its displaced non-teleworking contractors are now being paid under the same provision that applies during an extreme weather outage. It is believed this “weather” exception is also in place at various other sites across the DOE nuclear complex.
The South Carolina complex has one confirmed case of COVID and is keeping an eye on 130 workers who are self-quarantined because of either signs of sickness or possible exposure to someone with COVID-19.
The Energy Department said Friday that the Moab uranium tailing sites in Utah and the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee are the only two with something akin to normal operations. The Waste isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is also moving to only essential work. On Friday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered individuals traveling into the state via an airport to self-isolate or “self-quarantine” for 14 days.
