Department of Energy nuclear budgets will stay at fiscal 2017 levels through Dec. 22, under a short-term spending bill the head of the House Appropriations Committee introduced Saturday.
The Department of Energy (DOE), like the rest of the federal government, has been held at last-budget spending levels since early September, when Congress signed a continuing resolution after failing to produce a permanent federal budget bill for fiscal 2018. That bill expires Dec. 8, but all federal agencies would tread water for two weeks after that under the bill House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) just filed.
The new continuing resolution “will allow for additional time for a deal [to be] reached on top-line spending levels for this fiscal year,” the lawmaker said in a press release. “Once this agreement is made, my Committee will rapidly go to work with the Senate to complete the final legislation.”
The government’s fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
If Frelinghuysen’s bill is signed into law, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which helms cleanup of Cold War nuclear sites, would be funded for a couple more weeks at an annualized rate of $6.4 billion: not much less than the $6.5 billion the Donald Trump administration requested for fiscal 2018.
The department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, on the other hand, would get about two more weeks without the roughly $1-billion raise the administration sought for the current budget year. The DOE subagency manages U.S. nuclear warhead programs.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which regulates civilian nuclear power and waste, would receive the annualized equivalent of just over $1 billion. The Donald Trump administration requested just under $1 billion for 2018.
Meanwhile, under the stopgap CR, neither DOE nor NRC would get any of the money the administration requested for 2018 to resume licensing Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear-waste repository. The White House sought $120 million for DOE and $30 million for the NRC to resume licensing operations halted under the Obama administration.
