The Joe Biden administration was scheduled to release preliminary details about its fiscal year 2023 budget request on Monday, including top-line requests for defense and civilian nuclear programs at the Department of Energy.
The annual budget rollout marks the start of the spring and summer negotiating season between the White House and Congress. Lawmakers traditionally schedule hearings with agency heads after the agencies release their detailed budget justifications — something that often happens days or more after the White House Office of Management and Budget publishes the first details of the overall federal request.
DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) could see some strategically consequential, if financially minimal, changes following reports last week that the Biden administration wants to cancel the life extension of the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb and a sea-launched cruise-missile warhead based on the W80-4 warhead that the NNSA is preparing for the air-launched Long Range standoff weapon.
The NNSA budget may also include details about the agency’s plans for getting its plutonium pit production strategy back on schedule.
For DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, there was a familiar call to action in the halls of Congress recently, when members of the Washington State Department of Ecology visited Washington to advocate for raising the Hanford Site’s cleanup budget by about $1 billion year-over-year for 2023.
Meanwhile, the budget request could also shed some light on the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy’s plans for its consent-based siting effort, which had been getting by with some $20 million in funding the agency is using to refine its methods for picking a host community for a future federal interim storage site.
