Wednesday is the deadline for members of the House to submit amendments to a six-bill spending package that includes the House Appropriations Committee’s 2022 spending proposal for the Department of Energy, the chamber’s Rules Committee said.
After the amendments are in, the Rules Committee plans to meet sometime next week to finalize the rules of debate on the six-bill bundle, commonly called a minibus because it consolidates funding proposals for many federal agencies but does not fund the entire government, as an omnibus bill would. This year’s first House minibus does not include the annual Defense or Homeland Security spending proposals.
If the Rules Committee does produce its rule for the minibus next week, the full House will have a chance to pass the measure before members return to their districts for a month-long work period also known as the August recess. At deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, the Senate Appropriations Committee had not scheduled markups for any of its versions of the 12 annual federal spending bills.
The House Appropriations Committee on Friday approved a 2022 Energy and Water spending bill that would provide some $45 billion for DOE, up more than 7.5%, or $3.2 billion, from the 2021 appropriation.
Within the DOE total, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would receive some $7.8 billion for cleanup of shuttered nuclear weapons production sites for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. That’s up more than 2.5% both year-over-year and compared with the Joe Biden administration’s request, which unlike the committee’s budget would have trimmed funding for liquid-waste cleanup at the Hanford Site in Washington State and eliminated federal payments in lieu of taxes to local municipalities at Hanford and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, meanwhile, would get the requested $20 billion for 2022 for its nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs, including a requested $1.8 billion for building plutonium pit production factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in New Mexico. That’s about $350 million more than the 2021 appropriation of just over $1.35 billion, for the pit plants. The 2022 budget request could be the only one the Biden administration makes before it finishes a nuclear posture review in January that could propose big changes to the arsenal.
Meanwhile, DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy would get more than $1.65 billion under the House Committee’s bill — up more than 11%, or almost $167.5 million, from 2021 but some 11.5% lower than the $1.85 billion requested. The committee denied some $145 million in requested funding for the proposed Versatile Test Reactor, accounting for most of the difference between the request and the bill. The measure also provides funding only for guards and gates at Yucca Mountain, which the Joe Biden administration does not plan to develop into a permanent nuclear waste repository.
