The one-month stopgap budget House Republicans unveiled this week would if passed let only one part of the Department of Energy, its Inspector General’s Office, exceed the fiscal 2017 spending levels at which the rest of the agency has been stuck at for nearly four months.
The so-called continuing resolution would extend 2017 spending levels through Feb. 16: about a month after the current short-term budget that runs out on Friday. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he would sign the new bill, which was introduced the day before by the House Appropriations Committee.
The measure would permit DOE’s Office of the Inspector General (IG) to spend “up to the rate for operations necessary to sustain staffing levels achieved on June 30, 2017.” The IG had a nearly $45 million appropriation in fiscal 2017, which ended on Sept. 30 of last year. Ordinarily under a continuing resolution, agencies get one month of funding at a time, as opposed to the three-month installments typically provided under permanent budgets.
Exemptions such as the one the Inspector General’s Office would enjoy for the next month if the bill passes are known in Washington budget lexicon as anomalies. The IG got the only one of these within DOE in the latest budget plan.
The agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), steward of the nation’s nuclear warheads, got a spending anomaly to carry it through several months of temporary budgets in the 2017 budget year and has not had one since.
So once again, the NNSA would remain funded at the annualized equivalent of about $13 billion a year, instead of the roughly $14 billion the Trump administration requested for the current budget year. The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, which runs the nation’s Cold War nuclear-weapon cleanup programs, would get the equivalent about $6.4 billion: not much less than the $6.5 billion requested. The independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates commercial nuclear operations and radioactive waste, would get around $1 billion, or a little more than the request.
Meanwhile, there has been talk this week of a government shutdown, fueled by high-level political disagreements that have nothing to do with DOE nuclear programs. The agency would not comment on the possibility of a shutdown and deferred queries to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Office of Management and Budget could require agencies to draft and publish contingency plans to cope with a lapse in appropriations.
The last time that happened was 2013, when a partial government shutdown forced DOE and other agencies to lock out all but their essential personnel. Most of the people DOE kept on the job were in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Naval Reactors. Among other things, that office services nuclear reactors on deployed U.S. warships.
