Chris Schneidmiller
NS&D Monitor
10/30/2015
The two-year budget agreement approved by Congress this week opens the door for increased spending on Department of Energy nuclear weapons operations.
House lawmakers on Wednesday voted 266-167 in favor of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, which would raise the discretionary spending cap for security activities and non-security activities by $40 billion each over fiscal 2016 and 2017. It also raises the debt ceiling through the first quarter of 2017. The Senate followed with an early Friday vote of 64-35 to support the deal. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the legislation in short order.
"This agreement will strengthen the middle class by investing in education, job training, and basic research. It will keep us safe by investing in our national security," Obama said in a prepared statement Friday.
A number of GOP lawmakers made it clear they did not agree. "This deal represents the worst of the Washington culture. The left and the right have come together in an unholy alliance to explode the debt. The left gets more welfare, the right gets more military contracts, and the taxpayer is stuck with the bill," Senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor.
The security category covers the Department of Defense and DOE nuclear weapons work, along with intelligence operations and national security programs at a number of other federal agencies, according to a summary of the budget deal. The vast majority of funding within this category – more than 95 percent – generally goes to the Pentagon.
It was not immediately known what the increase in available funding would mean for military nuclear deterrent operations or the National Nuclear Security Administration, the semiautonomous agency that oversees the DOE nuclear arms activities.
A Pentagon spokesman on Thursday noted that DoD spending limits would have to be set by the National Defense Authorization Act, which also covers DOE defense programs. Obama last week vetoed the fiscal 2016 version of the act, which authorized $12.5 billion for the NNSA, over the use of Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding to skirt caps on the base budget. The Bipartisan Budget Act would set agreed OCO levels for fiscal 2016 and 2017, suggesting a resolution to the NDAA impasse.
With the deal finalized, appropriations committees in both chambers would go to work on a probable omnibus spending bill for this fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1. The federal government is currently funded under a continuing resolution that lasts through Dec. 11.
“My Committee will now begin the hard work of negotiating and crafting an omnibus Appropriations bill that will fund the entirety of the federal government through fiscal year 2016,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said in a prepared statement. “As always, we will go line by line through agency budgets and make decisions to ensure the best possible use of every taxpayer dollar. I look forward to this essential and important work, and to the completion of the Appropriations process before the December 11 deadline.”
