The National Defense Authorization Act passed early Thursday morning by the House Armed Services Committee authorizes nearly $315 million more for the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons cleanup in 2023 than the White House originally requested.
The bill, an annual must-pass piece of legislation that sets policy and spending limits for military and civilian defense programs, would authorize DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) to spend roughly $7.96 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
However, EM would only see the money if House appropriators back down from their proposal to give the office a roughly $7.88 billion budget for fiscal year 2023. The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee approved the sum on Tuesday.
The subcommittee’s bill is still subject to approval by the House’s full Appropriations Committee and the House at large, but unless the Committee or full House agrees to match the funding authorized in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), EM will only see the money if Senate appropriations decide to propose the match in their own bill, then fight for it in a bicameral conference committee later this year.
Most of the extra funding the House committee’s NDAA authorized Thursday for EM, some $270 million, would go to the Hanford Site in Washington State: the former plutonium production complex that fed Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear weapons. Another $44 million would go to the Savannah River Site, a later-era plutonium production plant and, like Hanford, now a cleanup site.
The full House had not scheduled a vote on the 2023 NDAA as of Thursday morning.
