The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) got an annualized budget of about $6.4 billion for fiscal 2017, some 3 percent more than last year, under the omnibus spending bill President Donald Trump signed today.
The budget passed with more than half of fiscal 2017 already gone, and with only five months to write, debate, and pass a budget for fiscal 2018, which begins on Oct. 1.
Under the omnibus, the Environmental Management office will get about 5 percent more, on an annualized basis, than what the Barack Obama administration requested in 2016 for the current budget year. The Department of Energy in total would receive $31 billion.
A detailed list of the puts and takes at EM can be found on the ExchangeMonitor’s budget tracker.
Among other things, the latest government spending package would raise the budget for cleanup at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, by almost 40 percent to some $315 million. That includes nearly doubling funding for on-site waste disposal facility where, beginning next decade, DOE plans to bury waste from decontamination and decommissioning of Portsmouth’s former uranium enrichment plant.
The bill also would jump-start construction of the new underground ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., by more than tripling funding to $30 million for a new exhaust shaft.
Also as expected, the omnibus ditches the Obama administration’s plan to fund uranium cleanup at the Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth sites by tapping into a moribund operations fund for the former United States Enrichment Corp. and reinstituting a tax on nuclear power.
Among the 10 major cleanup sites large enough to get their own budget lines in DOE’s annual funding bill, three would receive cuts relative to 2016 spending under the omnibus bill: the Richlands Operations Office at the Hanford’s Site in Washington state, down about 9 percent to roughly $840 million; WIPP, the only deep underground disposal site for transuranic waste, down about 2.5 percent to a little more than $290 million; and the Idaho National Laboratory, which has the biggest transuranic waste backlog in the DOE weapons complex, which got just over $380 million, a 3.5 percent drop.
The Obama administration had proposed increases for all of these sites in 2017.
Elsewhere in the report that accompanied the bill, Congress told EM the office’s 2018 budget request must include “all scheduled milestones and full multi-year funding plans” for all of its cleanup projects — “not just for projects for which the Department has established a performance baseline.”
2018 Budget Battles Loom
With the 2017 budget resolved, Congress and the White House now must prepare to pass a budget for 2018 by Oct. 1.
The White House is expected to release its fiscal 2018 budget request on May 22, but that would leave only about a month-and-a-half worth of work days for Congress and the administration to reach an accord on federal spending for next year.
The full budget request was slated to drop May 15, but the White House has now pushed the date back a week, according to a source in Washington. There are just over 90 days between the rumored budget drop and the end of the 2017 fiscal year, but Congress will be in recess for about half of them.
In a limited budget blueprint released in March, the administration proposed $28 billion for DOE: about 9 percent less than what the agency would receive under the 2017 omnibus spending bill Congress is voting on this week. The 2018 request includes almost $14 billion for the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), along with $6.5 billion for the Office of Environmental Management.
That would be the highest inflation-adjusted budget for EM in about 10 years, though the Trump administration has hinted some of the funding increase might be used to transfer some unneeded NNSA facilities over to Environmental Management for cleanup.
