The full House on Tuesday evening passed a stopgap spending bill that would essentially freeze federal spending, including at the Department of Energy, at 2021 levels until Dec. 3.
It was a party-line vote in the Democratic-majority chamber: 220-211, with one member not voting. The bill would make an exception to the 2021 budget for certain uranium-cleanup funding at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, allowing the $841 million requested for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund in 2022 instead of the $291 million allotted by the 2021 budget. The UED&D Fund is running dry and now has to borrow from the United States Enrichment Corp. Fund.
The Joe Biden administration asked Congress for this spending anomaly weeks ago so that that cleanup at DOE’s Portsmouth, Paducah and Oak Ridge sites wouldn’t stumble if Congress failed to pass 2022 spending bills on time and instead fell back on another continuing resolution to keep government agencies open after the 2022 fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1.
The stopgap budget now heads to the Senate, where Republican leaders have said the GOP might filibuster the bill over a provision that could raise the national debt limit — a limit that Congress has always voted to raise, but which remains politically contentious. The House-passed CR postpones a decision on raising the debt limit until December 16, with a debt-ceiling increase kicking in automatically on Dec. 17.
Overall, the latest continuing resolution has $7.6 billion for nuclear-weapons cleanup managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and $19.7 billion for active nuclear weapons programs managed by the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Each branch will make do, at least temporarily, with a little less than what unreconciled 2022 spending bills passed this summer by the House and the Senate Appropriations Committee would provide.
