A compromise stopgap budget bill to avert a government shutdown would keep Department of Energy nuclear weapons and waste budgets at 2021 levels past Valentine’s Day and preserve a funding safety valve for uranium-enrichment cleanup.
“Agreement has been reached on a Continuing Resolution,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Ct.) wrote in a statement sent to the press Thursday morning. The bill was “expected to be considered in the House today,” the chair said.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement he was “pleased that we have finally reached an agreement on the continuing resolution.”
Unless Congress passes the bill and President Joe Biden signs it before midnight on Friday, the government will shut down.
The measure appeared to leave intact language from the first stopgap budget of the year, passed in September, that allowed the Department of Energy to exceed the 2021 budget for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning fund “up to the rate for operations necessary to avoid disruption of continuing projects or activities” at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, and the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
Under the bill, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would get $7.6 billion for nuclear-weapons cleanup and the National Nuclear Security Administration would get $19.7 billion for its active nuclear weapons programs. DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which handles civilian nuclear waste matters, including the agency’s recently rebooted consent-based siting program, would remain at around $1.5 billion.
That’s a little less for each of those branches than what unreconciled spending bills passed this summer by the full House and Senate Appropriations Committee would provide.
