The full House this week passed a stopgap spending bill that would essentially freeze federal spending, including at the Department of Energy, at 2021 levels until Dec. 3.
It was a party-line vote in the Democratic-majority chamber: 220-211, with one member not voting.
The stopgap budget now heads to the Senate, where Republican leaders have said the GOP will filibuster the bill over a provision that could raise the national debt limit — a limit that Congress has always voted to raise, but which remains politically contentious. The House-passed continuing resolution attempts to postpone a decision on raising the debt limit until December 16, with a debt-ceiling increase kicking in automatically on Dec. 17.
Overall, the latest continuing resolution has $19.7 billion for active nuclear weapons programs managed by the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). That’s a little less than what unreconciled 2022 spending bills passed this summer by the House and the Senate Appropriations Committee would provide.
The Joe Biden administration did not ask Congress to make special provisions, or anomalies, for any NNSA programs in the continuing resolution the House approved this week. Anomalies in stopgap budgets may be necessary when a program is in a peak spending year and was expecting a substantial increases in costs.
