If passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama as expected, the bill will extend fiscal 2016 spending levels through April 28. After that, the new Congress will have to decide whether to keep budgets frozen for the next five months, or approve a new spending bill for President Donald Trump to sign.
Fiscal 2016 ended on Sept. 30. The current stopgap spending bill, passed in late September, runs through Friday.
While the new continuing resolution generally maintains current spending levels at DOE, there are some exceptions. Among these are a proposed budget increase for cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities at the department’s Paducah, Portsmouth, and Oak Ridge sites. The jobs are funded through the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, for which the House bill provides the annualized equivalent of more than $765 million through late April: better than a 10-percent increase from the 2016 appropriation.
However, the latest House bill allows DOE to take money out of the uranium cleanup fund and move it to other programs in a process known as reprogramming. Lawmakers did attach a string to that authority: DOE may not drain the fund below the fiscal 2016 appropriation of about $675 million. Given that other nuclear cleanup programs around the complex may have expected budget increases they would not get under a continuing resolution, DOE may well take advantage of the reprogramming authority offered.
Broadly speaking, the continuing resolution would keep DOE funded at an annualized level of about $29.5 billion, or about 10 percent less than the outgoing Obama administration requested. Legacy nuclear cleanup overseen by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management would get about $6.1 billion, more 1.5 percent above the 2017 request. The semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration would get an annualized $12.5 billion, or nearly 3 percent less than requested for 2017, though the new CR features language enabling funds to be employed for “critical nuclear weapons activities,” according to a House Appropriations Committee press release
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, regulator for commercial nuclear power plants and civilian nuclear waste, would get roughly $1 billion, or about 2 percent more than the 2017 request.
