Prospects for timely passage of a full 2020 budget for the Department of Energy and other agencies dimmed a little this week, when most Senate Democrats refused to curtail debate on spending legislation that includes funding for President Donald Trump’s proposed southern border wall.
The Senate failed Thursday to invoke cloture on a basket of budget bills, including DOE and Pentagon spending measures, by a vote of 51-41. The motion needed 60 votes to pass, which would have required significant buy-in from Democrats. Only two, Sens. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.), voted in favor of cloture.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) subsequently filed a motion to reconsider the cloture vote and send the bill toward a floor vote.
Three weeks now remain before federal funding lapses at the end of a continuing resolution that has kept the government running in the absence of signed appropriations bills after the Oct. 1 start of the 2020 fiscal year.
Two Capitol Hill sources on Thursday told Weapons Complex Monitor‘s affiliate publication Defense Daily that meetings between congressional leaders and the White House appear to be making headway on the outstanding spending bills.
However, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) has told reporters the Senate might have to extend 2019 budgets into the spring with another continuing resolution. The current stopgap bill runs out Nov. 21.
At 2019 levels, the Office of Environmental Management would get $7.2 billion at an annualized rate.
A couple sources in the Energy Department nuclear cleanup community said recently they expect another continuing resolution to carry the DOE Office of Environmental Management and other federal entities into January.
The House of Representatives in June passed a fiscal 2020 spending “minibus” package that includes funding for the Energy Department, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Pentagon. It keeps the DOE nuclear cleanup office funded roughly at the fiscal 2019 level of $7.2 billion.
The Senate Appropriations Committee in September approved a fiscal 2020 energy and water bill that would increase money for DOE environmental remediation to almost $7.5 billion. That measure has yet to be approved by the full Senate, however. The main difference with the House-passed bill is the additional $470 million in combined funding for the two DOE offices at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The full Senate on Thursday did pass its first appropriation package for fiscal 2020, covering departments such as Agriculture, Interior, and Transportation.
Skinny NDAA Allows Starts on New DOE Defense Nuclear Programs
A backup defense authorization bill rolled out this week by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) would authorize 2020 Department of Energy defense-nuclear spending and explicitly authorize starts for several new programs.
Inhofe lifted the lid on the so-called “skinny” fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) late Tuesday. The measure drops many of the specific policy prescriptions of the larger NDAA in an effort to avoid partisan disagreements that could derail the bill, Inhofe said. To that end, the legislation would extend key military spending authorities — payments for military personnel and funds for overseas war operations — beyond their current sunset date of Dec. 31.
It would also authorize Energy Department appropriations made available under either a permanent 2020 budget, or a continuing resolution enacted to keep funds flowing at 2019 levels after the current stopgap budget expires on Nov. 21.
Aside from authorizing spending on defense nuclear programs generally, the skinny NDAA would:
- Authorize DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to start work on new advanced manufacturing and salt-waste disposal projects at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., plus authorize work on parts of an on-site waste disposal facility at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, a former uranium enrichment complex.
- Authorize the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to expand a facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in preparation to begin producing war-usable fissile nuclear-weapon cores, or pits, and to expand part of the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York state to continue researching nuclear fuel improvements for the Navy.
Democratic lawmakers who lead the House, including Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), still say they would prefer to pass a full NDAA. Bicameral conference negotiations over that bill have stalled as Democrats resist Republican efforts to use the Pentagon’s budget to fund construction of the wall.
The Senate Armed Services Committee had not scheduled a vote on the skinny bill at deadline Friday.
Authorizers in both the House and Senate approved a spending cap in the neighborhood of $5.6 billion in their full NDAAs for defense environmental cleanup, which represents the largest chunk of funding for the Office of Environmental Management.
Authorization bills set policy and spending limits for appropriations bills, which are written by separate committees.
Vivienne Machi, staff reporter for Defense Daily, contributed to this report from Washington.
