The House Appropriations Committee this week unveiled a peculiar budget bill that would provide full-year fiscal 2018 appropriations for the Pentagon, but keep other federal agencies including the Department of Energy funded at prior-year levels through Jan. 19.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) introduced the bill Wednesday. The Department of Energy (DOE), like the rest of the federal government, is still funded at fiscal 2017 levels under a stopgap continuing resolution that expires Dec. 22.
The latest short-term funding plan would protect both military and civilian budgets from automatic across-the-board spending cuts that would otherwise begin in January because federal spending is above the level prescribed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.
While the House can pass the new continuing resolution on a party-line vote, the bill will need some Democrat votes in the Senate. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill said this month they want to fund both domestic and military programs in any new budget bill.
Under this week’s continuing resolution, the budget for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), regulator of civilian nuclear power and waste, would be frozen just above the requested level and receive the annualized equivalent of a little over $1 billion. The regulator’s budget has dropped by 6 percent since 2010 after anticipated growth in the commercial nuclear power sector failed to materialize and the NRC instituted efficiences (through its Project Aim program) including a reduction in staffing.
Also under the latest continuing resolution, neither DOE nor NRC would receive the funding the White House requested to resume licensing Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear-waste repository. The White House for fiscal 2018 sought $120 million for DOE and $30 million for the NRC to resume licensing operations halted under the Obama administration.
The project has bigger problems in Congress than a continuing resolution, however. Republicans in the Senate have shown no appetite for funding any Yucca programs and provided no money for the repository in a 2018 DOE budget the Senate Appropriations Committee approved in July.
The NRC budget was one focus of discussion Wednesday when all three sitting commissioners appeared for an oversight hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) noted a March 8 GAO report on the NRC’s budget structure and justification. “One of the things I found troubling in the report was it seems as though the NRC is keeping two sets of books,” the lawmaker said, quoting the report as stating there is “one to formulate its budget and another obligate funds based on its appropriations to Congress.
“To put it another way, the NRC has in its budget it creates a public consumption for Congress, but then operates under a separate budget in its internal operations, making it tough for authorizers and appropriators … to discern how the NRC is actually spending taxpayers’ dollars,” Capito said.
The regulator had 3,242 full-time equivalent positions (FTE) in September of this year, but the budget justification was for 3,405, according to Capito. That would equal roughly $25 million in extra funding for positions that were not filled, she said.
Commission Chairman Kristine Svinicki acknowledged the NRC’s reduction in force over the prior budget year. “The difference in funding, I would forecast, probably has shown up as carryover money from one budget year to the next,” she said. “If our staffing levels ended up being lower than thre requested budget, some of that would likely materialize as carryover funding into the fiscal ’18, the current fiscal year.”
The NRC chair cited the difference in FTE positions as a “forecasting error” in developing the budget two years in advance of its enactment.
