Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the House’s top appropriator for the Department of Energy, is interested in taking over the full Appropriations Committee in 2021 after her colleague, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), retires early that year at the end of the 116th Congress.
In a statement posted to Twitter on Thursday, Kaptur, chair of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said she would be “interested in placing my name for consideration” as chair of the Appropriations Committee “when the time is appropriate.”
That theoretically would be sometime late next year, after the Nov. 3, 2020, general election — assuming Democrats keep their majority in the House.
Lowey announced Thursday that she would retire.
“I am honored that my colleagues in Congress elected me as the first Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee and will fight vigorously for House Democratic priorities as I negotiate spending bills for fiscal years 2020 and 2021,” she said in a statement.
Lowey joined Congress in 1989, and became ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee in 2013. She was elevated to chair in January, after Democrats won the House majority in the November 2018 midterm elections.
The subcommittee Kaptur chairs this year produced an appropriations bill, approved by the full House over the summer, that provided less funding that requested for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) civilian nuclear weapons programs. Kaptur said the White House’s request for more weapons money unfairly shorted the NNSA’s roughly $2-billion-a-year portfolio of nonproliferation programs and the Department of Energy Environmental Management office’s roughly $7-billion-a-year portfolio of Cold War nuclear weapons cleanup.
The House approved just under $16 billion for NNSA for the 2020 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1: about $500 million less than requested. That included about $11.7 billion for weapons activities, roughly 6% lower than requested, and just over $2 billion for nonproliferation, or some 4% more than requested. The Environmental Management office would get more than $7 billion in the House bill, about 10% more than requested.
The NNSA, like the rest of the government, is now funded by a stopgap budget appropriation that stretches the 2019 budget — which is around 4% lower, on an annualized basis, than what the House approved for 2020 — through Nov. 21.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed around $17 billion for the NNSA in 2020. The full Senate, bogged down by partisan disagreement over President Donald Trump’s proposed southern border wall, has yet to vote on the energy and water bill that contains the NNSA and DOE funding.
