Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Tuesday defended his agency’s proposed $400 million-plus budget reduction at the Hanford Site in Washington state, even while the cost of cleanup is on the rise.
“On one hand the department is telling us the mission is going to become exponentially more expensive,” even as it cuts the remediation budget at the former plutonium production complex, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), whose congressional district covers Hanford, said during a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
Perry was appearing before the panel to discuss DOE’s $31.7 billion budget proposal for fiscal 2020, in the first of several trips this week to Capitol Hill.
A Jan. 31 Energy Department report placed the full cost of Hanford remediation anywhere from $323 billion to roughly $677 billion, under best-to-worst cases. That is a quantum leap from the last agency estimate in 2016, which estimated the cost at $103 billion to $107 billion.
“It’s a pretty shocking number,” Perry agreed, saying he supported the DOE Office of Environmental Management issuing the updated and more realistic estimate.
At the same time, Perry said past spending at Hanford had not been sufficiently efficient. “I couldn’t understand why aren’t we making any better progress,” he said. “Why is this not moving along the way we would think it ought to move along?”
The $6.5 billion budget request for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is well below the $7.2 billion enacted level for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. Fundng for the two offices that manage environmental remediation at Hanford would drop by more than $400 million from current levels, from roughly $2.5 billion to $2.1 billion.
Newhouse and subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) hinted they intend to beef up the administration’s proposed funding in the House version of the DOE-funding bill.
The Energy Department budget proposal should be viewed “in the context of a president’s budget request,” which seeks to live within legal caps on non-military spending, Simpson said.
