While the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state would receive a haircut under the fiscal 2023 budget request rolled out Monday by President Joe Biden’s administration, a citizen group leader expects Congress will beef up the cleanup appropriation for the former plutonium production facility.
Funding for the Richland Operations Office would be $818 million in the new fiscal year, down significantly compared with $950 million in the budget deal for fiscal 2022. The Hanford Office of River Protection would be funded at $1.6 billion, down about $40 million from last year’s total.
“This is very common for the WH [White House] budget numbers for Hanford,” said Nikolas Peterson of Hanford Challenge in an email. Peterson is deputy and legal director at the organization and effective this Friday will succeed Tom Carpenter as the executive director. Frequently, the White House proposes a decrease “and then Congress adds funding to get it back to normal/average spending,” Peterson said.
On this issue, David Reeploeg, executive director of Hanford Communities, an intergovernmental cooperative group of counties and cities around Hanford, agrees. “We’ve seen requests from multiple administrations that proposed insufficient funding for Hanford cleanup,” Reeploeg said in an email. “Thankfully, we have a congressional delegation that understands the importance of Hanford cleanup, and they’ve done an excellent job of increasing the budget in each of those years,” said Reeploeg, himself a former staffer for Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash).
The overall appropriation requested for the DOE Office of Environmental Management is $7.6 billion, down a little from the $7.9 billion fiscal 2022 appropriation recently negotiated by Congress and signed into law by Biden and about equal to what the cleanup office got for fiscal 2021.
