The House of Representatives wants to give the Pentagon a permanent budget for the rest of fiscal 2018 while keeping other federal agencies at 2017 spending levels under another stopgap spending plan that would expire March 23.
The continuing resolution would free the Defense Department to begin new programs with funding through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. Other agencies would still be allowed no new starts.
House Republicans banded together Tuesday to send the bill to the Senate in a 245-182 largely party-line vote over the objection of most House Democrats.
The measure’s future in the Senate, where legislation requires 60 votes to pass, is uncertain. Republicans hold a 51-seat majority, and Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) today panned the House’s “gambit” to appease the upper chamber with a permanent defense budget.
The latest continuing resolution would be the fifth of the 2018 fiscal year. It contains no new exceptions for the Department of Energy (DOE) to exceed its 2017 budget. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) would still have permission to spend above 2017 levels for uranium enrichment cleanup at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio. The rest of EM would be funded at the annual equivalent of $6.4 billion: a little below the $6.5 billion the Trump administration requested for this budget year.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would continue at an annualized $13 billion. The Trump administration had requested about $14 billion for the fiscal year that is now almost halfway over. Most of that would have gone into NNSA nuclear weapons programs, now funded around at around $9 billion a year.
The independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, would receive the annualized equivalent of about $1 billion: just over the request for fiscal 2019. As with DOE, the commission is prohibited under the continuing resolution from starting any substantial work to resume licensing Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear-waste repository. Congress might prohibit that anyway, even if a permanent 2018 spending bill passes. The Senate has shown no appetite to fund Yucca.
