Congress this week passed a temporary spending bill that will keep the Department of Energy funded at 2017 levels for at least more than two months into the new fiscal year, setting up another holiday-season budget showdown on Capitol Hill.
The House on Friday voted in favor of a Senate-approved plan of disaster relief and debt-ceiling expansion that also funds the federal government through Dec. 8. Fiscal 2018 begins on Oct. 1. As of deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, President Trump was expected to sign the measure.
The Energy Department would, under the so-called continuing resolution, remained funded on an annualized basis at its current appropriation of about $30 million. That includes some $6.4 billion for the Cold War nuclear cleanup overseen by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management and nearly $13 billion for the active weapons and nonproliferation programs led by the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Continuing resolutions freeze funding at levels set by the last appropriations bill, unless Congress includes a so-called anomaly that allows programs to deviate from prior-year spending. The stopgap legislation did not include any anomalies for the NNSA.
The White House had proposed a nearly 9-percent year-over-year budget cut for DOE in 2018 — to roughly $28 billion — which neither the House nor the Senate was prepared to grant. The House proposed cutting DOE by about 3 percent from 2017, while the Senate proposed just over a 2-percent raise. The administration also wanted a 7-percent increase for the NNSA in the next budget, most of which the House and Senate supported. The raises would primarily go to the NNSA’s nuclear weapons programs.
The continuing resolution puts on hold, at least temporarily, the Trump administration’s plans to transfer excess NNSA facilities to Environmental Management for final cleanup. The White House sought $225 million for that purpose in 2018, but the House and the Senate were prepared only to give $75 million and $55 million, respectively. Both the House and Senate energy appropriations bills proposed transferring facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee to Environmental Management. The House bill additionally proposed transferring a facility at the Idaho National Laboratory.
Meanwhile, the NNSA’s Weapons Activities account will not see even a part of the $1-billion raise the White House proposed in 2018 for at least the first quarter or so of the upcoming fiscal year. The House matched the 10-and-a-half-percent year-over-year increase the administration proposed for these programs, while Senate appropriators recommended a roughly 8-percent hike.
“Given the massive increase NNSA requested for weapons activities for FY 2018, roughly $1 billion above FY17, a CR would certainly be disruptive to their plans,” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, wrote in a Friday email. “I guess the question is for how long they think they could get by at the FY17 level without significant disruption. I suspect it wouldn’t be very long.”
The last continuing resolution Congress passed before this one, a bill that kept the government funded from December 2016 through late April, included a funding anomaly that gave the NNSA broad authority to spend whatever it needed on Weapons Activities.
Among the NNSA weapons initiatives for which the White House wanted more money in 2018 are life-extension and modernization of existing nuclear armaments such as the W80-4 warhead and B61-12 gravity bomb. The White House also wants to accelerate construction and modernization of the plutonium pit-production facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and increase funds for subcritical plutonium experiments at the Nevada National Security Site that are essential to maintaining the potency of existing fissile materials.
Conversely, the continuing resolution would leave the NNSA’s nonproliferation budget just under 5 percent higher than the roughly $1.8 billion the White House sought. The House’s 2018 DOE spending bill would cut the nonproliferation budget even more: by about 5-and-a-half percent to roughly $1.77 billion. Senate appropriators proposed a roughly 2-percent cut to almost $1.84 billion.
The continuing resolution also leaves the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at DOE’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. with the annualized equivalent of the roughly $335 million it received for 2017.
The Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, wants to cancel the project and requested around $280 million for fiscal 2018 to start closing out the facility that would convert plutonium into reactor fuel. The House flat-out refused to defund MOX, while Senate appropriators gave the go-ahead — over the loud objections of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — to cancel the project more than a decade after the NNSA broke ground in Aiken County.
Representatives for major NNSA contractors, including AECOM, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, and Fluor Corp., did not reply to requests for comment for this story regarding the budget situation. An NNSA spokesperson in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.
