On Thursday, Congress passed the $858-billion 2023 National Defense Authorization Act and a bill to keep the Department of Energy and the rest of the U.S. government running at fiscal 2022 spending levels for another week.
The defense authorization bill awaited the signature of President Joe Biden at deadline friday. The stopgap budget, signed Friday afternoon, keeps DOE’s Environmental Management office at $7.9 billion on an annualized basis. That’s even with the House of Representatives’s full-year 2023 budget proposal, passed this summer, but less than the $8.3 billion the Senate Appropriations Committee subsequently recommended.
The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that passed the Senate 83-to-11 Thursday would allow the DOE Office of Environmental Management to spend about $7 billion on its Defense Environmental Cleanup account alone. That account represents most the office’s annual cleanup budget. The bill would allow the National Nuclear Security Administration to spend about $22.3 billion, or about $880 million more than sought by the White House. Authorization bills set policy and spending limits for separate appropriations bills.
The stopgap budget had almost as much support in the Senate as the NDAA, cruising by Thursday 71-to-19 to avoid a partial government shutdown that otherwise would have started Saturday. Lawmakers are hoping the extra week will allow them to settle the details of a full-year 2023 omnibus bill for fiscal 2023, media have reported.
The House of Representatives passed the NDAA last week and the short term budget extension on Wednesday.
The pro-rated stopgap spending bill provides the National Nuclear Security Administration with the annualized equivalent of $20.66 billion, while Environmental Management would receive a $7.9-billion-equivalent. This year’s NDAA is named in honor of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the 88-year-old ranking GOP member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is retiring.
ECA starts pushing 2024 increase
With resolution in sight for the 2023 fiscal year that started Oct. 1, the Energy Communities Alliance is already urging the White House to plan for bigger DOE nuclear cleanup budgets starting in fiscal 2024.
Without requesting a specific figure, the advocacy group for localities near DOE facilities said in a Friday letter to President Biden that the biggest nuclear weapons cleanup sites will take many decades to remediate at the current $7.9 billion level.
That is because the current cleanup tab is an estimated $723 billion, according to the Friday letter signed by Brent Gerry, mayor of West Richland, Wash, which borders the Hanford Site. Hanford has a projected end date of 2078. Cleanup at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, DOE’s longtime weapons uranium hub, won’t wrap until 2047 and cleanup at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., the second industrial-scale U.S. plutonium production site, will go on until 2065, the letter adds.
