The National Defense Authorization Act passed early Thursday morning by the House Armed Services Committee roughly matches the White House’s modified request for the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons cleanup in 2023.
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. The Joe Biden administration modified its 2023 budget request in June to funnel $191 million more into EM, for a total ask of about $7.83 billion.
EM will only see the money authorized this week by the House Armed Services Committee if the House Appropriations Committee, and the full House after that, approves and adds funding to a draft energy and water spending bill approved Tuesday by an Appropriations subcommittee. That bill would give EM about a $7.88 billion budget for fiscal year 2023.
If the House eventually aligns the funding authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with the funding in a separate House appropriations bill, EM will still need Senate appropriators and authorizers to to match the figure.
The Senate had not unveiled its version of the NDAA as of Friday, but according to an executive summary, the bill authorizes some $200 million less for EM’s bread-and-butter Defense Environmental Cleanup account than what House authorizers and appropriators approved this week.
The full House had not scheduled a vote on its 2023 NDAA as of Friday. The House Appropriations Committee had not scheduled a markup of the 2023 energy and water development appropriations act — the DOE budget bill — as of Friday.
Appropriations bills are separate from authorization bills. Appropriators, who provide funding from the treasury, do not have to match authorized funding levels, which are essentially idealized guidelines.
For the EM’s single largest account, Defense Environmental Cleanup, the draft DOE appropriations act approved Tuesday at the House subcommittee level proposes $6.7 billion, about even with the modified budget request and the 2022 appropriation. The account funds cleanup of Cold War and Manhattan Project sites and operation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.
The office’s Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, which pays for cleanup of former uranium enrichment plants in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee, would get more than $820 million from the subcommittee’s bill, which is about $18 million below the 2022 appropriation but almost $1 million more than requested. As it was last year, the fund’s appropriation would be funneled through the Defense Environmental Cleanup account.
Meanwhile, Non-Defense Environmental Cleanup, which includes among other things the West Valley Demonstration Project in upstate New York, would essentially keep its 2022 budget of about $334 million, under the subcommittee’s bill. That’s about $10 million more than requested.
