The chairman’s mark for the House of Representatives’ fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would add about $700 million to the top line for the Trump administration’s $5 billion request for defense environmental cleanup operations managed by the Department of Energy.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) released his mark over the weekend, ahead of the panel’s markup of the defense policy legislation on Wednesday.
The proposal would increase the amount set out for defense environmental cleanup by the Donald Trump administration to about $5.73 billion. Defense environmental spending is the largest bloc of money included in the annual budget for the DOE Office of Environmental Management, which oversees remediation of 16 Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear sites.
The vast majority of the proposed increase would go toward the Hanford Site in Washington state, the former plutonium production facility considered the nation’s most complex and costly cleanup job. Total spending for Hanford would be authorized at $2.5 billion, about equal to the amount approved by Congress during fiscal 2020, which ends Sept. 30.
Funding for Hanford’s Richland Operations Office would be capped at $904 million, and the Office of River Protection would be authorized at more than $1.6 million. Each of the two Hanford offices would have their line item increased by roughly $350 million compared to the Energy Department request.
The rest of the House panel’s increase in defense environmental spending would go to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Its authorization would rise from $1.53 billion to roughly $1.57 billion.
The House Armed Services chairman’s mark would also extend by one year the current prohibition on the Energy Department reclassifying any high-level waste in Washington state.
The Senate Armed Services Committee version of the fiscal 2021 NDAA would increase defense environmental spending by $100 million over the president’s request, to $5.1 billion.
Actual funding would be contained in separate appropriations legislation. The House and Senate Appropriations committees have yet to release any bills for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. In the current year, DOE Environmental Management received about $7.5 billion from Capitol Hill.
