President Joe Biden (D) on Friday signed the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, setting a year’s worth of spending limits and policy for national security programs, including those at the Department of Energy.
The law is separate from appropriations bills that provide money for federal agencies to spend. The Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and some agencies are funded at 2023 levels through Jan. 19 under a temporary spending bill. The Pentagon and other agencies are funded through Feb.2, under the same bill.
Under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Defense Environmental Cleanup programs at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would receive a little less than $7.1 billion, about $30 million less than requested. This is the largest, but not the only, account in the nationwide nuclear-weapons cleanup program.
Meanwhile, the NNSA is authorized to spend $24 billion, or about $200 million more than the Biden administration requested.
The newly passed NDAA directs the NNSA, against the administration’s wishes, to continue work on a sea-launched variant of the planned W80-4 cruise-missile warhead. It also forbids expanding a plutonium disposal mission at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico until the nuclear-weapons design lab certifies that the mission will not interfere with the planned production of plutonium pits.
Finally, as reported in November, the final 2024 NDAA does not contain a Senate-sponsored packaged of nuclear-energy reforms that would have greased the skids for development and export of U.S. advanced nuclear reactors, levied new reporting requirements at the Department of Energy, extended federal indemnity for nuclear reactor operators and increased congressional scrutiny of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s workforce.
A House committee in December passed its own package of bipartisan nuclear-energy reforms, though as of Tuesday, with Congress still out of town for Christmas and New Year’s, it was not scheduled for consideration by the House Rules Committee, the gatekeepers of the House floor.
