In a letter earlier this year, two Democratic appropriators in Congress blasted the secretary of energy about moving money around in the Department of Energy’s budget to cover the soaring cost of the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
“We write to you to express our deep concerns about the Executive Branch’s fiscal year 2023 budget planning for the Uranium Processing Facility [UPF],” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) wrote in a May 15 letter to Granholm obtained by the Exchange Monitor.
“Not only did the National Nuclear Security Administration [NNSA], with the support of your agencies, fail to disclose the known costs of the project for this fiscal year, NNSA … devised a budget plan that was predicated on abusing the reprogramming process and eroding the Committee’s proper role in considering reprogramming requests by threatening staff layoffs if the Committees objected to the reprogramming request.”
The Department of Energy wants to reprogram $91.5 million for the Uranium Processing Facility, a move that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget approved. That was part of DOE’s plan to cover an expected increase of $2 billion or more from the agency’s previous projection that the facility for nuclear-weapon second stages would be built by December 2025 and cost no more than $6.5 billion.
NNSA’s latest estimate has the facility costing between $8.5 billion and $8.95 billion and wrapping up in the first half of fiscal 2029. The NNSA has said that failing to fund that $203 million overrun would result in the layoffs of about 1,100 craft personnel and about 500 professional staff.
Kaptur and Feinstein wrote that the NNSA’s budget plans counted on the necessary reprogramming being approved in order to keep those staff in place and the project on schedule.
“Any ‘budget plan’ that involves knowingly and willfully abusing the reprogramming authority that Congress has provided to NNSA is unacceptable and a violation of the comity principles upon which the entire reprogramming process is built,” the lawmakers wrote. “NNSA’s actions appear to have been designed to invalidate the longstanding role of the Appropriations Committees to approve or disapprove reprogramming requests.”
