A government shutdown loomed Friday as some Senate Democrats held hostage a stopgap spending bill to keep the federal government and its Cold War nuclear cleanup work funded through late April.
The House passed the so-called continuing resolution Thursday, then adjourned for the week. In the Senate, however, Democratic lawmakers led by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) this week wanted to insert better healthcare provisions for retired miners into the bill. Because of the Senate’s parliamentary rules, the earliest other senators could unite to break this mini-filibuster is Saturday — a day after the current continuing resolution expires. That would result in a brief government shutdown.
The funding bill Brown, Manchin, and the others are holding up would be the second continuing resolution of the 2017 fiscal year. Under the measure, federal agencies including the Department of Energy would maintain their 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.
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 might have expected budget increases they would not get under a continuing resolution, DOE could well take advantage of the reprogramming authority.
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 language in the continuing resolution also enables the NNSA to reallocate funding within its nuclear weapons activities portfolio to ensure there are no delays to critical projects in coming months. The measure requires the secretary of energy to notify the House and Senate Appropriations committees within 15 days of a change in funding – positive or negative — to a DOE program, project, or activity in excess of $5 million or 10 percent of its funding in fiscal 2016.
“DOE/NNSA is developing its funding plan while under a CR and will be sharing it with Congress after the CR is enacted,” NNSA spokesman Francie Israeli said by email Thursday.
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.
