Proposed DOE EM Funding Increase Dwarfed by Cost of Taking Over NNSA Facilities

The $88 million top-line increase the Donald Trump administration proposed Tuesday for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2018 is two-and-a-half times less than the office would spend next year to start decontaminating disused nuclear-weapon facilities now owned by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The administration’s new budget plan, if approved by Congress, would provide $6.5 billion for Cold War nuclear waste cleanup managed by the Environmental Management (EM) office: about 1 percent more than the office got in the 2017 omnibus appropriations bill that became law on May 5. Overall, DOE’s budget would drop almost 9 percent in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. to about $28 billion.

As foreshadowed in the limited budget blueprint released in March, the White House wants EM in fiscal 2018 to begin cleaning up some facilities the NNSA no longer needs for active nuclear weapons programs.

On Tuesday, the White House requested $225 million for EM “to deactivate and decommission specific high-risk excess contaminated facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,” according to a new DOE budget document. The document did not say which specific facilities would be involved.

Turning these NNSA facilities over to EM would allow DOE “to achieve substantial risk reduction within four years” at these sites, the White House Office of Management and Budget said in an appendix to the administration’s funding proposal.

In congressional testimony this week before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, neither NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz nor acting Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Sue Cange identified the facilities EM would take on if the White House’s 2018 budget proposal becomes law.

Meanwhile, accurate comparisons between the Trump administration’s request for DOE EM and the office’s appropriation under the 2017 omnibus spending bill were not possible this week.

Congress did not pass a permanent fiscal 2017 spending bill until three-quarters of the budget year had elapsed. That meant federal agencies such as DOE had already started drawing up their 2018 budget documents by the time lawmakers presented them with their final budget for the current period. In that scenario, DOE and other agencies compared their 2018 request with the 2016 appropriation: the last full budget year on the books.

Meanwhile, EM still had not released its detailed budget justification for the 2018 fiscal year at press time for Weapons Complex Monitor Friday. That document, which traditionally includes detailed breakdowns and discussion of all proposed EM spending, usually arrives at the same time as the White House’s budget proposal.

Cange told Weapons Complex Monitor Thursday there was no timetable for releasing the document.

“We’ve been working with OMB [the White House Office of Management and Budget] on finalization” of the justification, Cange said in a brief interview after testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington.

Pressed about the reasons for the delay, Cange said EM was “just trying to address last-minute questions and working with OMB.”

The Office of Environmental Management did release a top-level list of its proposed site budgets for 2018 as part of DOE’s budget-in-brief. Those figures, along with a comparison with the 2016 budget, are: