Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) on Monday announced he will leave the Senate after 2020.
Alexander chairs the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, in which capacity he is the gatekeeper for upper chamber funding of the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. He has held the gavel there since 2015.
The news came days after a staffer said Alexander planned to continue chairing the subcommittee for the next two years.
Should Republicans retain control of the Senate following the 2020 elections, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) are tied for seniority on the full Appropriations Committee, among panel members who do not already chair one of its 12 subcommittees. Of the pair, only Kennedy serves on the energy and water subcommittee now.
An industry source said Thursday he believes a good subcommittee chair is available to from the current GOP crop if the Republicans maintain their majority in 2020. The source credited Alexander for helping win hefty budgets for Oak Ridge and the Y-12 Security Complex, although much of that might have happened anyway given their national mission.
The Appropriations energy and water panel draws up the Senate’s first draft of the annual DOE and NNSA budgets. It proposed $7.2 billion for the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office for fiscal 2019, an amount ultimately signed into law for September. That was well above the $6.6 billion requested by the White House, and slightly more than what was requested by House appropriators.
The final fiscal 2019 budget package, which took effect Oct. 1, includes $410 million in cleanup money for the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, $10 million more than the $400 million enacted for 2018 and far above the $226 million in the administration request.
