Senior officials with the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and Office of Environmental Management were set to take questions about their fiscal year 2023 budget requests Wednesday from House appropriators.
The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee was scheduled to convene the hearing at 2:15 p.m. Eastern time on Capitol Hill. The subcommittee will livestream the hearing on its website, where the witnesses’ written testimony was available for public review.
Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was set to testify about civilian nuclear weapons programs alongside three other senior NNSA officials.
William “Ike” White, senior advisor for the Office of Environmental Management (EM) and the top EM official at DOE headquarters in Washington, was to testify on behalf of the office charged with cleaning up shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites.
The NNSA requested $21.4 billion for fiscal year 2023, which begins Oct. 1, up from the 2022 appropriation of just under $20.7 billion. That would be an increase of about 3.5%, or some $754 million, year-over-year. NNSA wants to plow more money than earlier forecast into its campaign to build a pair of factories, one in New Mexico and one in South Carolina, to make new nuclear-weapon triggers, or plutonium pits.
EM, meanwhile, requested about $7.6 billion for fiscal 2023, down from a 2022 appropriation of nearly $7.9 billion. That would be a yearly drop of about 3.2%, or more than $210 million.
