Members of Congress are scheduled to offer their opinions about the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2019 budget on Wednesday in a Members Day hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
The session is a middle point of sorts in the annual appropriations cycle, scheduled between the subcommittee’s initial investigative hearings on the DOE budget request and the yet-to-come markup of the panel’s recommended energy budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
The hearing is open to the public and will be webcast. The appropriations subcommittee had not released a witness list at deadline Sunday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The White House requested $30.6 billion for DOE in 2019: 1 percent lower than the 2018 budget approved as part of an omnibus spending bill signed in March. Within the total, DOE seeks: $15 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration nuclear stewardship and nonproliferations work, about a 3-percent increase from 2018; and $6.6 billion for the Office of Environmental Management’s programs to clean up Cold War nuclear-weapon waste, or 7.5 percent less than the 2018 omnibus.
The Energy Department wrote its 2019 budget request before Congress erased federal spending caps for 2018 as part of the latest omnibus.
