The House Rules Committee on Monday delayed by one day writing rules of debate for a package of fiscal 2021 appropriations bills that includes funding for the Department of Energy.
The committee is scheduled to take up H.R. 7617 at 11 a.m. today. That would keep the lower chamber on pace to this week approve the $1.4 trillion “minibus” covering defense, commerce, energy and water, education, and other federal operations. There were 60 amendments pending to the energy and water portion of the bill alone, including a pair by House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Turner (R-Ohio) aimed at preserving Pentagon input into the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) annual budget request, and slightly boosting NNSA nuclear-weapon programs at the expense of nuclear nonproliferation and cleanup.
A separate amendment from Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) would prohibit any funds from the bill from being used to lower the rate of on-site inspections by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or to pull an inspector from an active or decommissioning nuclaer power reactor while used fuel is being moved from wet storage to dry storage.
The seven separate spending bills were advanced by the House Appropriations Committee in recent weeks, then grouped into one package. All amendments will have to make it out of the Democrat-controlled Rules Committee to even get a vote on the House floor later this week.
The first Turner amendment would erase the bill’s proposed prohibition against the joint Pentagon-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council from providing input about the NNSA annual budget request. The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee drafted that provision, which the full committee approved two weeks ago on a party-line vote.
The second Turner amendment would marginally boost funding for NNSA’s Weapons Activities account by $85 million to just under $13.75 billion, compared with more than $13.65 billion already approved by the committee.
That still would not boost the account anywhere close to its requested level of over $15.5 billion. The text of Turner’s amendment did not say how much specific weapons programs would benefit, but a summary of his proposal said it would increase spending for:
- Construction of the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The committee proposed $600 million for 2021, down $145 million from 2020 and $150 million below the request.
- Development of the Lithium Process Facility at Y-12. The White House requested $140 million for the facility in 2021, but the committee’s bill would provid no funding. The project has a $32 million budget in 2020. The NNSA needs lithium to create tritium, which boost the efficiency, and therefore the destructive power, of nuclear weapons.
- Plutonium operations at the Los Alamos National National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., where NNSA plans to start casting plutonium pits this decade and next. Los Alamos operations would get $500 million under the House bill, which is $312 million above the 2020 budget but $110 million less than requested. Savannah River operations would get $65, a big drop from $345 million or so in 2020, and nearly $135 million below the request.
- Early development of the proposed W93 submarine-launched, intercontinental ballistic-missile warhead. The NNSA wanted $53 million for this in 2020, but the House Appropriations Committee zeroed out the request in its roughly $49.5 billion Energy and Water appropriations bill.
The extra funding for the NNSA weapons work would be offset by cuts to the NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account, DOE Office of Environmental Management, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP).
