Against a backdrop of controversial amendments, a looming White House veto threat and the impending U.S. Memorial Day holiday, House lawmakers failed Thursday to pass the spending bill that contained the chamber’s proposed 2017 budget for the Energy Department.
House members now will leave town for a week-long Memorial Day recess, after which the Republican majority will have to try a new tack to pass the roughly $34.7 billion 2017 Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act.
After two days of debate, the House killed the bill by a wide margin, voting 112-305 against passage. House Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the bill, with 175 of that 188-member caucus voting “no.”
Also voting “no” were 130 Republicans — more than half of all House Republicans — many of whom earlier in the week opposed a Democratic amendment from Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) that would effectively have made law a 2014 executive order by President Obama that prohibits federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating against employees based on either sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Maloney amendment passed Wednesday, with the support of every Democrat who voted on it, and with 43 Republican votes.
The Senate, meanwhile, has already passed its version of DOE’s 2017 budget, which is part of a $37.5 billion Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill the chamber approved May 12.
If Congress cannot produce a unified spending bill by the end of the government’s fiscal year Sept. 30, lawmakers could be forced to fund the government under a stop-gap measure known as a continuing resolution that would freeze DOE spending at the 2016 level of $29.6 billion and prohibit new program starts.
Democrat and Republican aides on Thursday each said their parties had strong ideological disagreements that manifested themselves in some of the many amendments that wound up attached to the would-be DOE budget bill. The flood of amendments was due in part to House leadership making it relatively easy for members to introduce tweaks to the bill on the floor.
The open debate rule under which the House considered its energy and water spending bill was set in place at the direction of House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who took the gavel last year promising fewer constraints on amendments as an overture to some Republicans who felt they had been blocked by their own party from influencing the appropriations process.
In a Thursday press conference televised by C-Span, Ryan said he always knew the open amendment process could slow down the budget process.
“Some bills might fail because we’re not going to tightly control the process…that’s what happened here today,” Ryan said. “When we return, we’ll get with our members and figure out how best we can move forward to have a full-functioning appropriations process.”
Ideological controversy in the lower chamber is not the only obstacle in the bill’s path – the White House threatened to veto Monday, even before the full House took up the measure.
The veto threat cited a lack of sufficient funding to meet the administration’s pledge to double clean energy research and development.
“While the bill increases certain energy research and development activities, it underfunds critical energy research and development activities overall. The bill does not put the Nation on a sufficiently ambitious path toward doubling clean energy research and development by FY 2021,” according to the statement of administration policy released Monday.
At the opening of the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change in late November 2015, the U.S. and 19 other countries pledged to double their respective clean energy research and development under a new initiative dubbed “Mission Innovation.”
According to the administration’s statement, “the bill underfunds the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs, with levels significantly below the FY 2017 Budget request.”
The administration requested $500 million for ARPA-E, $209 million more than fiscal year 2016 funding levels. The House version of the bill would fund the program at $305,889,000, an increase of $14,889,000 from FY16, but $194,111,000 less than the request. “This reduction would hinder the ability to invest in transformational technologies that reduce energy-related emissions, increase energy efficiency across multiple economic sectors, and reduce energy imports,” the statement says.
The administration is also unimpressed with the House’s denial of its request to reallocate significant funding pulled from the Texas Clean Energy Project carbon capture and storage demonstration. “The Administration urges the Congress to provide adequate funding for clean energy priorities by using or reallocating $240 million in balances within the Fossil Energy R&D account identified in the FY 2017 Budget request as unnecessary for Fossil Energy R&D activities,” the statement says.
The House bill funds fossil energy R&D at $645 million, $285 million above the administration’s request, which relied on the $240 million of reallocated prior-year balances to fund the program at $600 million.