Senate appropriators give less than House for NNSA weapons, more for cleanup

Editor’s note, Aug. 01. The story was updated with comment from Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

WASHINGTON — Senate appropriators on Thursday proposed a 2025 Department of Energy budget that would pile funding the House wants to put into nuclear weapons into nuclear-weapons cleanup.

That’s according to a detailed bill report the Senate Appropriations Committee released Thursday morning. By 27-0, the committee passed the 2025 energy and water development fiscal year 2025 appropriations. It was one of four pieces of legislation marked up during a debate that began at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time and took under two hours. The 2025 fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

For the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Senate appropriators declined to go along with their House colleagues in approving higher-than-requested funding for new plutonium pit infrastructure, the Uranium Processing Facility, or Infrastructure and Operations, which is an agency-wide maintenance account, a detailed spending report released Thursday with the bill shows. 

For DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, on the other hand, the Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), provided unrequested funding for liquid-waste cleanup at the Hanford site in Washington state, the bill report shows. House appropriators recommended the requested level.

Under the Senate committee’s bill, NNSA weapons activities would get a little under $20 billion: about even with the request, $820 million or so more than the 2024 budget and some $400 million less than what House appropriators approved in July in a bill that has since stalled on the House floor.

The Office of Environmental Management would receive $7.5 billion for defense environmental cleanup, the single largest tranche of funding in the 35 year-old cleanup office. That would be about $440 million more than requested, $215 million more than in 2024 and some $425 million above the House request.

Within the Senate committee’s recommended cleanup budget is “a significant increase in funding for the Hanford site in Washington state,” Murray said during Thursday’s markup. 

Hanford would get a total of $3.2 billion under the Senate committee’s bill: about $110 million more than requested, nearly $290 million more than in 2024 and almost $235 million more than House appropriators approved, according to the bill report.

The Senate’s bill report also said that carrying out terms of the so-called holistic agreement, struck this year among DOE, Washington state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to change cleanup deadlines at Hanford, will call for increased funding at the former plutonium production complex in future years.

As of 4:00 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday afternoon, the Senate committee had posted only a summary of the energy and water bill online.

Asked here by the Monitor about NNSA funding in the Senate compared with the House, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, said “it’s okay.”

“We’ve got a long way to go on this, and I’m glad we’re making progress,” Kennedy said. However, “we’ve received no assurance whatsoever from [Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate majority leader] that he’s going to put these votes on the floor.”

“My prediction,” Kennedy said, is that “we’re going to end up in September with a [continuing resolution] that continues the status quo until after the election.”

Sarah Salem contributed to this report from Washington.