With less than a month left until fiscal year 2024 begins, the White House has asked Congress for a short-term continuing resolution to freeze federal budgets at 2023 levels.
Media reported last week that leaders in the House and Senate have remained open to the requested stopgap bill. Fiscal year 2024 begins Oct. 1.
The impasse between the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate is unrelated to DOE nuclear weapons programs. The two chambers disagree on whether the mandatory government spending cuts included with this spring’s legislative deal to increase U.S. borrowing caps should be treated as a ceiling or a floor for federal budgets.
For DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the Senate Appropriations Committee proposes $8.5 billion for the nuclear cleanup office. The House Appropriations Committee and President Joe Biden’s White House have both called for keeping fiscal 2024 funding at the current $8.3 billion level.
The Senate appropriators’ version would provide nearly $7.3 billion for Defense Environmental Cleanup, easily the biggest tranche of spending, while the House bill would provide a little less than $7.1 billion. That’s equal to the Biden request and incrementally higher than the 2023 $7-billion appropriation.
The Senate-side bill has $354 million for Non-Defense Environmental, more than the $352 million agency request and the $342 million House proposal. The fiscal 2023 appropriation was $359 million.
The Senate committee’s $862 million proposal for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund is less than the House’s $865 million proposal and less than the $879 million omnibus package approved by Congress for fiscal 2023. The administration requested $858 million.
As usual, the Hanford Site’s two operations offices in Washington state, Richland and River Protection, will take up a third of the total DOE nuclear cleanup office budget. The former plutonium production complex would receive more than $2.9 billion under the Senate committee’s bill, which is an incremental increase over the almost $2.9 billion sought by DOE and more than $100 million over the $2.8 billion proposed by House appropriators.
Meanwhile, the Senate’s fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill sets the spending ceiling for Defense Cleanup at $7.1 billion, roughly equal to the House version of the NDAA.
