The Department of Energy would keep its 2021 budget through Dec. 3, under a short-term stop-gap budget bill unveiled this week by the House Appropriations Committee.
The bill would push an increase in the U.S. debt ceiling off until Dec. 16: an effort to untether continued funding for government agencies from the always-politically-contentious issue of allowing further government debt to service existing government debt.
For Department of Energy nuclear weapons and waste programs, the bill would be an essentially clean funding extension: The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), would stay at the annual equivalent of $19.7 billion while the Office of Environmental Management would receive the equivalent of $7.5 billion.
Each DOE sub-agency would, if the stop-gap becomes law, get a little less than the House and the Senate Appropriations Committee have already approved for fiscal year 2022, which begins Oct. 1.