The fiscal-year 2025 budget season is heating up and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was set to appear Wednesday before appropriators on Capitol Hill.
Granholm was scheduled to testify about the Department of Energy’s $51-billion budget request at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time before the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), a big booster of DOE’s Oak Ridge and Y-12 National Security Complex sites in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The hearing was scheduled to stream online at the committee’s website via YouTube.
Within DOE’s $51-billion 2025 request, $750 million more than the 2024 appropriation signed into law March 9, the agency seeks: $25 billion for active nuclear weapons programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), or $1 billion more than the 2024 budget; $8.3 billion or so for the cleanup of shuttered nuclear weapons sites overseen by the Office of Environmental Management, about $250 million less than the 2024 budget; and roughly $1.6 billion for the Office of Nuclear Energy, responsible among other things for DOE’s civilian nuclear waste programs. That would be about $100 million less than the current budget.
DOE’s defense- and civilian nuclear programs seldom star in budget hearings with the Secretary of Energy.
The agency’s non-nuclear portfolio is an annual partisan lightning rod, as is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, DOE’s incubator for energy technologies of all kinds, including nuclear-energy technology. Republicans and Democrats seldom agree about what belongs in the incubator.
