With less than a month left until fiscal year 2024 begins, the White House has asked Congress for a short-term continuing resolution to freeze federal budgets at 2023 levels.
Media reported last week that leaders in the House and Senate have remained open to the requested stopgap bill, which may be necessary due to an impasse between the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate that is unrelated to civilian nuclear energy and waste programs.
If the year begins with a continuing resolution, the civilian nuclear energy and waste programs in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy would make do with the annualized equivalent of roughly $1.47 billion over the course of the stopgap bill.
That’s worse than the office would do under any of the proposals for 2024 now on the table.
The White House requested about $1.56 billion for Nuclear Energy in 2024, 6% above the 2023 budget, which the Senate agreed to match. House appropriators, however, proposed nearly $1.8 billion for the office, which would be more than 20% increase year-over-year.
Most of the proposed increase in the House bill would be for spending more money than requested on development of advanced nuclear reactors. The Senate bill would provide none of that funding, but it would give DOE explicit direction to find somewhere to build a federally operated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.
The House and Senate this year disagree on whether mandatory government spending cuts packaged with this spring’s legislative deal to increase U.S. borrowing caps should be treated as a ceiling or a floor for federal budgets. The House has proposed a 2024 federal budget far below what the deficit deal allows.
The GOP-led House and the Democratic Senate are also at odds over a host of red-meat issues for their voters, including some that have seeped into this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Ordinarily, the fate of that bill, which sets policy and spending limits for national security programs, would not much trouble civilian nuclear power or waste matters.
This year, however, the Senate’s version of the NDAA comes parceled with a substantial set of nuclear-energy policy reforms that touch on everything from advanced reactor exports to morale at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the mounting expense to the government over the continuing failure to build a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel.
Eventually, the Senate’s NDAA will have to be reconciled with the House’s, which includes restrictions on abortion and diversity programs for members of the armed services. Democrats are broadly against any such restrictions.
In addition, House Republicans have their own ideas about nuclear policy reforms which could either be squared with the Senate’s proposal, modified to include some version of what members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved this summer, or dropped altogether.
