WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy’s final budget for the 2018 fiscal year that began last October might be published Monday, the agency’s top House appropriator told reporters Thursday.
After a hearing on the 2019 budget with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said congressional leaders “hope to put it [the bill] online” Monday. If approved, the omnibus would provide funding for the government through Sept. 30: the remainder of this budget year.
Simpson, chair of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, declined to discuss the contents of the 2018 omnibus appropriation, as it had not been released publicly. Last year, Congress took until May to approve a final federal budget.
The Department of Energy, like all federal agencies except the Pentagon, has essentially had its 2017 budget carried into the first five-and-some months of the 2018 fiscal year because Congress, as usual, could not agree on a permanent appropriation on time.
Before 2018 budget negotiations broke down last year, the House and Senate appropriations committees produced DOE spending bills that included many of the same provisions. Both chambers were both essentially willing to grant a roughly 8-percent increase to active nuclear-weapon programs managed by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and they agreed the Office of Environmental Management should take over and remediate disused NNSA facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In the case of the disused NNSA facilities, both chambers proposed far less funding than the White House sought.
The House and the Senate were about $215 million apart on their final 2018 budget recommendations for the NNSA, and about $240 million apart on the final funding level for the Environmental Management office, which helms DOE’s cleanup of Cold War nuclear weapons sites.
Both the House and the Senate essentially met the White House’s 2018 NNSA budget request of nearly $14 billion, with the Senate coming in lower than the House. For the Environmental Management office, the Senate would have provided about $6.6 billion, while the House would have provided about $6.5 billion.
The most striking difference in the draft DOE budget the House and Senate produced last year was their treatment of the agency’s nuclear waste-storage program. The House agreed for fiscal 2018 to provide $120 million for DOE to resume licensing Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent commercial-defense waste repository. The Senate provided no money for Yucca and instead wanted to create a new interim storage pilot program.
For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would conduct the Yucca licensing adjudication that will surely pit DOE against proposed host-state and project opponent Nevada, the White House requested about $950 million for 2018. The Senate recommended about $915 million, while the House recommended about $940 million.
