A compromise stopgap budget bill passed Congress Thursday to avert a government shutdown and 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.
The Senate voted 69-to-28 Thursday evening to approve the continuing budget resolution to keep the federal government open through Feb. 18, according to Roll Call and other national news outlets.
Earlier that day, the House of Representatives passed in a 221 to 212 vote, H.R. 6119, the Further Extending Government Funding Act to keep the government open.
The agreement on the budget deal was announced Thursday morning by senior appropriators in the House and Senate. President Joe Biden was expected to sign the measure today to keep the government open.
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.
