The Senate Armed Services Committee’s proposed 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides for $5.1 billion in defense environmental cleanup funding.
The Senate committee passed the roughly $740 billion NDAA package after its Wednesday markup, by a vote of 25-2.
The $5.1 billion for defense environmental cleanup would be the largest bloc of annual funding for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, a Senate staffer said Friday.
The annual NDAAs set policy and spending caps for defense programs at the Pentagon and Department of Energy. Actual funding comes via separate appropriations bills.
The House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to mark up its version of the bill from June 22 to July 1. Politico reported this week that the Senate Appropriations Committee will begin marking up fiscal 2021 bills the week of June 22, and that the House Appropriations Committee will begin its work the week of July 6.
Congress authorized $5.6 billion for defense environmental spending in the NDAA for fiscal 2020, which ends Sept. 30.
In full, the Environmental Management office received $7.5 billion for the budget year, about $1 billion more than the Trump administration requested. The total EM budget also includes non-defense environmental cleanup and the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund.
For fiscal 2021, the White House has asked Congress to appropriate $6.2 billion for the DOE nuclear cleanup office, with almost $6 billion for defense environmental cleanup.
As of Friday, a 20-page summary was the only document released for the Senate NDAA. The full bill might come to the Senate floor as soon as next week, committee aides said, at which point the panel will release the legislative text, plus a detailed report with details on funding for individual programs.
