Federal agencies were still open for business Thursday morning, after President Trump signed a stopgap budget bill that freezes most federal budgets at 2020 levels through Dec. 11.
With appropriations set to lapse at midnight, the Senate on Wednesday cast votes to pass the measure with less than a working day left before the literal eleventh hour. The measure sailed through the upper chamber 84-10, with six senators not voting.
Under the measure, Department of Energy nuclear-weapons cleanup programs managed by the Office of Environmental Management (EM) will get more funding than requested, while active nuclear weapons work managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will get dramatically less.
The measure provides the annualized equivalent of about $7.45 billion for EM, about $1.3 billion more than requested.
A big winner at least in the short term will be the sprawling Hanford Site in Washington state. Together Hanford’s Richland Operations Office and the Office of River Protection will continue to be funded at the annualized level of $2.5 billion. The White House requested only $1.8 billion combined for the two Hanford offices.
Former Department of Energy officials note that the agency will try to stay well below the higher fiscal 2020 levels during the continuing resolution in the event that the final budget ends up being closer to the smaller figure proposed by the administration. No new projects are expected to launch during the stopgap period.
NNSA would get the equivalent of roughly $16.7 billion, some $3 billion less than requested. NNSA had warned that any appropriation below the 2021 request will affect delivery of refurbished nuclear weapons to the military, and now the agency has exactly that for nearly the first quarter of the fiscal year that began early this morning.
Elsewhere in federal nuclear programs, DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy would get $156 million under the continuing resolution, some $28 million less than requested, while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would receive about $855 million, about $10 million below the request.
