Congress on Friday passed a one-week continuing resolution that would hold the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup budget at the fiscal 2016 level of just over $6 billion through May 5.
President Donald Trump was expected to sign the bill but had not at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor.
The latest bill contained no new anomalies — special permissions to exceed prior-year funding levels — for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. It does, however, include a clause allowing uranium-enrichment cleanup at the Portsmouth, Paducah, and Oak Ridge sites to spend at an annualized level of more than $765 million: about 10 percent higher than 2016 levels.
That clause was part of the temporary 2017 spending bill then-President Barack Obama signed in December. The new stopgap bill essentially extends the measure Obama signed, which was set to expire today, by one more week.
If signed by President Donald Trump, the new bill would sustain the annualized DOE budget of about $29.5 billion the agency has lived with for almost two fiscal years now. That is some 10 percent less than the Obama administration requested for fiscal 2017, which began on Oct. 1.
Legacy nuclear cleanup overseen by the Environmental Management office would get about $6.1 billion, more than 1.5 percent above the 2017 request.
The semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration would receive an annualized $12.5 billion, or nearly 3 percent less than requested for the current budget year. Language in the continuing resolution enables the NNSA to reallocate funding within its nuclear weapons activities portfolio to ensure there are no delays to critical projects for the duration of the temporary measure.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, regulator for commercial nuclear power plants and civilian nuclear waste, would get roughly $1 billion, or about 2 percent more than the 2017 request.
House lawmakers unveiled the latest short-term spending bill late Wednesday after an angst-filled week in which Trump threatened not to sign any interim budget bill that did not include funds for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall. He later backed off the demand, setting the table for Congress to pass a bridge bill that will give lawmakers time next week to hash out the budget for the remainder of fiscal year 2017.
