Congress successfully passed yesterday a Continuing Resolution that will fund the federal government through Dec. 11 at Fiscal Year 2015 enacted levels and avoids a government shutdown. The CR enables Congress an additional 10 weeks to work towards a budget solution, but with uncertainty in the House following Speaker John Boehner’s recent planned resignation announcement, there remains no guarantee that Congress will make any additional progress come December. Appropriation leaders, though, are hoping to avoid the need for any additional CRs or shutdown threats. “Once again, Congress has had to act on a short-term funding bill to keep the lights on in government,” House Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said in a statement. “This yearly, destabilizing practice is bad for the U.S. economy, bad for the reliability of important government programs – including our national defense – and wastes federal money by arbitrarily postponing actions that make better use of taxpayer dollars. However, this legislation is absolutely necessary, as the alternative – a government shutdown – is reckless and irresponsible.”
Among the anomalies included in the CR, the bill used language that would authorize the Departmentof Energy to advance ongoing defense cleanup, “particularly at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.” The language will help avoid hundreds of layoffs at the Portsmouth cleanup. According to House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), appropriators tried to ensure flexibility so layoffs would be avoided. “We’ve talked to our members from Ohio who were very concerned about this, and it was one of the things we wanted to make sure we put into the CR with the anomalies,” Simpson said at the DOE National Cleanup Caucus yesterday. “That’s one of the reasons I hope the CR is shorter than Dec. 11, that we can get it done before then. I want to work with the Secretary to make sure he has the flexibility to rearrange funds so we don’t have layoffs simply because we are on a short-term CR while we are doing the omnibus.” The CR did not include any anomalies related to the National Nuclear Security Administration or DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
