At the last minute Dec. 9, after deadline for last week’s issue of Weapons Complex Monitor, the Senate passed a stopgap spending bill that will keep the federal government open and funded at fiscal 2016 levels through April 28.
An earlier stopgap bill, known officially as a continuing resolution, was set to expire at midnight on Dec. 9. A small group of Senate Democrats had threatened to push the government into a temporary shutdown over Republican reluctance to extend healthcare benefits for retired coal miners in the bridge budget bill, which the House passed a day earlier.
The Senate signed off on the legislation in a 63-36 vote less than an hour before midnight. President Barack Obama signed the legislation shortly afterward.
Under the measure, federal agencies including the Department of Energy would maintain their fiscal 2016 spending levels. After that, the new Congress will have to decide whether to keep spending levels frozen for the following five months, through the end of fiscal 2017 on Sept. 30, or approve a new spending bill for President Donald Trump to sign.
While the new continuing resolution generally maintains current spending levels at DOE, there are some exceptions. Among these are a proposed budget increase for cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities at the department’s Paducah, Portsmouth, and Oak Ridge sites. Those jobs are funded through the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, for which the bill provides the annualized equivalent of more than $765 million through late April: better than a 10-percent increase from the 2016 appropriation.
However, the new continuing resolution allows DOE to move money within the uranium cleanup fund to other programs in a process known as reprogramming. Lawmakers did attach a string to that authority: DOE may not drain the fund below the fiscal 2016 appropriation of about $675 million.
The stopgap bill keeps DOE funded at an annualized level of about $29.5 billion, or about 10 percent less than the outgoing Obama administration requested. Legacy nuclear cleanup overseen by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management would get about $6.1 billion, more than 1.5 percent above the 2017 request.
The semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration would get an annualized $12.5 billion, or nearly 3 percent less than requested for 2017. Language in the continuing resolution enables the NNSA to reallocate funding within its nuclear weapons activities portfolio to ensure there are no delays to critical projects in coming months.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, regulator for commercial nuclear power plants and civilian nuclear waste, would get roughly $1 billion, or about 2 percent more than the 2017 request.
