Against a backdrop of controversial amendments, a looming White House veto threat and the impending U.S. Memorial Day holiday, House lawmakers failed Thursday to pass the spending bill that contained the chamber’s proposed 2017 budget for the Energy Department.
House members now will leave town for a week-long Memorial Day recess, after which the Republican majority will have to try a new tack to pass the roughly $34.7 billion 2017 Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act — a bill the White House threatened to veto Monday, even before the full House took up the measure.
After two days of debate, the House killed the bill by a wide margin, voting 112-305 against passage. House Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the bill, with 175 of that 188-member caucus voting “no.”
Also voting “no” were 130 Republicans — more than half of all House Republicans — many of whom earlier in the week opposed a Democratic amendment from Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) that would effectively have made law a 2014 executive order by President Obama that prohibits federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating against employees based on either sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Maloney amendment passed Wednesday, with the support of every Democrat who voted on it, and with 43 Republican votes.
The Senate, meanwhile, has already passed its version of DOE’s 2017 budget, which is part of a $37.5 billion Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill the chamber approved May 12.
If Congress cannot produced a unified spending bill by the end of the government’s fiscal year Sept. 30, lawmakers could be forced to fund the government under a stop-gap measure known as a continuing resolution that would freeze DOE spending at the 2016 level of $29.6 billion and prohibit new program starts.
Democrat and Republican aides on Thursday each said their parties had strong ideological disagreements over some of the many amendments that wound up attached to the would-be DOE budget bill. The flood of amendments was due in part to House leadership making it relatively easy for members to introduce tweaks to the bill on the floor.
The open debate rule under which the House considered its energy and water spending bill were set in place at the direction of House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who took the gavel last year promising fewer constraints on amendments as an overture to some Republicans who felt they had been blocked by their own party from influencing the appropriations process.
In a Thursday press conference televised by C-Span, Ryan said he always knew the open amendment process could slow down the budget process.
“Some bills might fail because we’re not going to tightly control the process…that’s what happened here today,” Ryan said. “When we return, we’ll get with our members and figure out how best we can move forward to have a full-functioning appropriations process.”
Ideological controversy and political sausage-making aside, the House and Senate still have some significant differences to iron out in their 2017 DOE spending bills.
The House’s version of DOE’s 2017 budget, for example, would have provided $170 million to resume the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. That tiny share of the total appropriations package was one of the reasons the White House gave for its veto threat Monday.
The Senate’s bill, on the other hand, includes no money for Yucca, which has always been and remains strongly opposed by retiring minority leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Instead, the bill would provide about $60 million for the White House’s consent-based siting approach to nuclear waste storage.
Meanwhile, while the House and Senate bills each provide roughly the $12.9 billion the White House requested for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the two chambers took different positions on the agency’s Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Facility. The Obama administration wants to cancel the MOX plant, which is under construction at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., as part of a broader shift in strategy for complying with a nuclear arms reduction agreement finalized with Russia in 2010.
The House bill would provide $340 million for the MOX plant, while expressly forbidding the White House from halting construction on the project. The Senate’s bill provided $270 million and left the door open for the administration to halt construction on MOX.
The MOX plant is designed to turn some 34 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors. The White House, in the 2017 budget request it released February, proposed instead to dilute the plutonium, mix it with an inert solid, and store the resulting mixture permanently at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
For nuclear waste cleanup overseen by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the House and Senate differ on which cleanup sites need the most money. Relative to the House’s bill, for example, the measure the Senate approved earlier this month would increase funding for river corridor and central plateau cleanup at the former Hanford Site plutonium production complex near Richland, Wash., and reduce funding for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
In April, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee and manager of the bill that died on the floor Thursday, was confident the House and Senate would resolve their differences in conference. After Thursday, it was less clear whether that conference would take place before the end of the fiscal year.
