Congress passed and President Joe Biden (D) on Friday signed an appropriations bill that sets the Department of Energy’s fiscal year 2023 budget at $46.2 billion and provides year-over-year raises for nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons cleanup programs that exceed the White House’s request.

The bill also provides close to the requested funding for civilian nuclear energy and nuclear waste programs at the Department of Energy.

Biden also signed on Friday the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which among other things allows the NNSA to retire 25% of the B83 bombs in its inventory and requires the DOE weapons agency to draft a new report about its plutonium pit-production plans at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The total DOE appropriation for 2023 is up about $1.4 billion compared with the 2022 budget but roughly $2.8 below the Biden administration’s request, which included large increases for programs mostly unrelated to nuclear weapons, nuclear cleanup and civilian nuclear energy.

National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) nuclear weapons programs receive $22.2 billion under the new omnibus spending bill: some $750 million more than requested and $1.5 billion more than the 2022 appropriation. 

DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, responsible for cleanup of shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites, receives $8.3 billion: or $359 million more than the $7.9 billion appropriated for 2022. The White House had proposed keeping cleanup funding flat for 2023.

DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy gets a little under $1.5 billion, some $200 million less than requested and just under the 2022 appropriation of $1.6 billion. However, the omnibus also has $300 million more in emergency funds for Nuclear Energy, bringing the office’s total fiscal 2023 appropriation to roughly $1.8 billion.