This week, the House Appropriations panel that writes the first draft of the Department of Energy’s annual budget bill called off a hearing with the agency’s top nuclear weapons and waste leaders minutes into the proceedings.
The hearing got no further than opening statements and a few questions from Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the chair, and ranking member Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) before Kaptur pulled the plug, citing a long series of votes on the House floor.
“You’re more important than … the circus” on the floor, Kaptur said, moments after getting consent from Simpson and the other members to reschedule the hearing.
In the minutes after Kaptur’s game-day call, the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee had not rescheduled the hearing.
One of the 25 scheduled votes on the House floor was a bill that would extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to 2024 from July 2022. The law provides financial awards to certain people in the continental U.S. who were sickened by atmospheric nuclear-weapon tests and uranium mining. The Senate has already passed the extension and lawmakers on each side of the Hill are working to extend the law’s sunset period even further and broaden eligibility for compensation.
For Wednesday’s hearing, Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was set to testify about civilian nuclear weapons programs alongside three other senior NNSA officials.
The NNSA requested $21.4 billion for fiscal year 2023, which begins Oct. 1, up from the 2022 appropriation of just under $20.7 billion. That would be an increase of about 3.5%, or some $754 million, year-over-year. NNSA wants to plow more money than earlier forecast into its campaign to build a pair of factories, one in New Mexico and one in South Carolina, to make new nuclear-weapon triggers, or plutonium pits.
Kaptur took a dim view of the proposed increases during Wednesday’s truncated hearing.
“NNSA’s Weapons Activities budget has increased $3.5 billion, 28%, since the fiscal year of 2020. But NNSA continues to run over budget and behind schedule on its nuclear warhead life-extension programs,” Kaptur said. “Now, NNSA and [the Department of Defense] say they will not meet pit production schedules. Frankly, this is really unacceptable.”
