ARLINGTON, VA —Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) Tuesday prodded hundreds of people here for the National Cleanup Workshop to urge their congressional representatives to avoid a federal government shutdown but stopped short of predicting a stopgap agreement before fiscal 2023 ends Sept. 30.
“Reach out to your member of congress,” said Fleischmann, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee’s energy and water development subcommittee. Tell the lawmaker “’Please, we do not want to have a government shutdown’,” said Fleischmann.
Asked by Exchange Monitor if he expects Congress to avoid a shutdown, Fleischmann said “I sincerely hope so.
“I have lived through some government shutdowns,” Fleischmann said.
During one early shutdown, Fleischmann, whose district includes the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, recalled seeing a popular restaurant saying everyone was welcomed to eat there, except for members of Congress.
While Fleischmann would not make a prediction, a couple of weapons-complex government watchers attending the DOE National Cleanup Workshop, hosted here by Energy Communities Alliance, said they expect a continuing budget resolution will be reached by Sept. 30 and will likely extend into January.
Republicans who control the House of Representatives want sharply lower government spending in 2024, lower even than what is allowed under a bipartisan deal struck this spring to extend the government’s money-borrowing authority.
Democrats who control the Senate want to spend the maximum allowed under the deficit deal, which was a compromise between House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Califl.) and President Joe Biden (D).
The National Nuclear Security Administration is unaffected by the caps in the deficit deal and the House and the Senate are essentially in agreement that the Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency should receive about $24 billion in fiscal year 2024, roughly $2 billion more than the 2023 appropriation.
One of the big differences in the proposed NNSA budgets from the House and Senate is the amount of funding the Uranium Processing Facility should get.
Fleischmann, an unblinking booster for the project, penciled a $1-billion appropriation into the spending bill written by the appropriations panel he chairs. Democrats in the Senate, on the other hand, stuck with the President’s request of about $760 million.
Democratic appropriators are irate that the over-budget Uranium Processing Facility, which faces substantial delays and cost overruns, was supposed to receive a funding injection from other NNSA projects.
