Federal agencies including the Department of Energy will make do with a couple more weeks of their 2022 budgets while Congress works toward a full-year spending deal.
The House and Senate Appropriations Committees on Tuesday announced they had reached an agreement in principle on a framework for the full-year budget, but lawmakers had not released further details as of Wednesday morning.
Because it will take a week or more to negotiate and write the new bill, appropriators planned to extend 2022 budgets with another continuing resolution. This one will run through Dec. 23, the Friday before Christmas Eve. The current continuing resolution, passed after the House, Senate and White House failed to agree on 2023 budgets before the Oct. 1 start of the 2023 fiscal year, runs through Friday.
For the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Office of Environmental Management and Office of Nuclear Energy, it’s a clean continuing resolution. Those parts of DOE will continue with annualized budgets of $26.67 billion, $7.9 billion and $1.65 billion, respectively.
NNSA also got an extra $35 million “to respond to potential nuclear and radiological incidents in Ukraine,” per the text of the original continuing resolution for this year.
For the NNSA, especially, the stopgap means operating with much lower budgets than what the White House requested or Congress seemed poised to approve. NNSA administrator Jill Hruby said last week the agency will start feeling financial pain if continuing resolutions continue too long into the new calendar year.
There is less than a month to go before the new session of Congress starts, when Republicans will take over the House and all pending legislation becomes null and void in both chambers.
Editor’s note, 8:58 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022. The story was changed to include the correct date on which the existing continuing resolution will expire.
