Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs would get almost exactly the funding they requested for fiscal year 2022, if the House’s first draft of the Department of Energy’s budget bill becomes law.
The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee released its draft 2022 energy and water appropriations act on Sunday and planned to mark up the bill Monday at 1 p.m. Eastern time. The full Appropriations Committee was scheduled to mark up the bill Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern time, along with the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Bill.
For DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the subcommittee bill proposes about $20.2 billion, a little more than the request of roughly $20.1 billion and some $420 million more than the 2021 appropriation of about $19.7 billion. The bill does not reflect any conclusions from the Biden administration’s yet-to-be-completed Nuclear Policy Review, which at deadline the administration planned to publish in January.
The subcommittee’s bill would provide exactly the requested $15.8 billion or so for NNSA Weapons Activities, the account that handles nuclear-weapons modernization and infrastructure upgrades. That’s more than 10% less than what the Donald Trump administration thought the account would need for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, according to the Future-Years Nuclear Security Program the Trump administration included last year with NNSA’s 2021 budget request.
On the other hand, the NNSA’s nonproliferation account would get more than requested, under the subcommittee’s bill: just under $2.5 billion. That is about 3.5%, or $76 million, more than requested. That would be a raise of roughly $80 million, compared with the 2021 appropriations.
NNSA Naval Reactors, supporting manufacture of nuclear cores of Navy warships and submarines, plus nuclear fuel fabrication, would get a little more than $1.85 billion. That is only about $300,000 fewer than requested and more than 10%, or roughly $140 million, above the 2021 appropriation of about $1.7 billion.
Usually, the energy and water development subcommittee does not release the detailed spending report for its bill until a day before the full Appropriations Committee’s markup. The bill report contains a line-by-line breakdown of the subcommittee’s spending proposal, listing programs by name and explaining any recommended changes relative to the White House’s request.
