A small bipartisan group in the House released a foreign aid bill with new border security policies and war aid for Ukraine, but no stimulus funds for domestic uranium enrichment.
The roughly $66-billion bill filed Feb. 15 by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) is a counterproposal to the roughly $95-billion foreign aid bill the Senate passed, also on Feb. 15, and which Speaker of the House Rep. Michael Johnson (R-La.) said the lower chamber was in no hurry to pass.
The Senate’s proposal started out as a bipartisan border security bill with Ukraine aid but Senate Republicans tanked the bill at the urging of former President Donald Trump (R), the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Senate Democrats, who control the chamber with a razor-thin majority, then cut the border aid out of the bill and it easily passed.
The Senate’s bill has $2.7 billion to jumpstart a new U.S. uranium refining industry. The Department of Energy says it needs these funds to pay for contracts that would allow the agency to acquire large tranches of high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) needed to help commercial advanced nuclear reactors.
That money is nowhere to be found in the bill proposed by Fitzpatrick and his nine cosponsors, five of whom were Democrats. Likewise, Fitzpatrick’s bill has no funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration to monitor nuclear and radiological threats from Ukrainian nuclear power plants that have been taken over by invading Russians.
Russia in 2022 again invaded Ukraine. Moscow claimed it wanted to protect what it characterized as ethnic Russians threatened by far-right political groups in Ukraine. The administration of President Joe Biden (D) has framed its requested commercial uranium stimulus as a way to wean U.S. utilities off of Russian uranium, which remained legal to import. Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress, mostly Republicans, have shown some appetite for banning Russian uranium outright, stimulus or no.
The House was not in session this week and was scheduled to return to Washington on Feb. 28.
