With less than a month left until fiscal year 2024 begins, the White House has asked Congress for a short-term continuing resolution to freeze federal budgets at 2023 levels.
Media reported last week that leaders in the House and Senate have remained open to the requested stopgap bill.
The impasse between the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate is unrelated to DOE nuclear programs. The two chambers disagree on whether the mandatory government spending cuts included with this spring’s legislative deal to increase U.S. borrowing caps should be treated as a ceiling or a floor for federal budgets.
Those cuts do not apply to the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which under a continuing resolution would miss out on a roughly $2-billion increase to $24 billion or so. A few differences aside, House and Senate appropriators largely agree on the figure.
Meanwhile, under a continuing resolution, nuclear weapons cleanup handled by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management would be largely unaffected at the top line. House Appropriators this year proposed about $8.3 billion for the office for 2024, roughly flat compared with the 2023 level. Senate appropriators proposed a small increase, to $8.5 billion. Much of that would go to the Hanford site in Washington state.
Fiscal year 2024 begins Oct. 1.
If the year begins with a continuing resolution, the civilian nuclear energy and waste programs in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy would make do with the annualized equivalent of roughly $1.47 billion over the course of the stopgap bill, worse than the office would do under any of the proposals for 2024 now on the table.
Senate appropriators proposed roughly $1.56 billion for fiscal year 2024, which is about $230 million less than what House appropriators proposed for the office.
The Senate bill includes explicit direction that DOE’s nuclear energy office continue to look for a place to build a federally operated, consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. The House bill eschews that direction in favor of prescriptions that DOE spend more money, much more than requested, to develop new nuclear reactor designs.
Editor’s note, Sept. 08, 2023, 11:56 a.m. Eastern time. The story was corrected to show how much funding the Office of Nuclear Energy would receive under a continuing resolution.
