The Senate on Thursday at last united to pass a fiscal 2017 spending bill with $31 billion for the Department of Energy, but the House cannot even begin floor votes on its own backlog of spending bills until Monday because Congress still has not agreed on overall spending levels for the next budget year.
It took the Senate more than two weeks to end debate on its $37.5-billion Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill and actually vote on the measure. The largely bipartisan spending proposal was nearly derailed by a controversial amendment, stripped from the bill Wednesday, that would have forbidden DOE from buying heavy water from Iran. Heavy water can be used to make plutonium.
The Senate’s bill is technically an amendment to the House’s 2017 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill, which still awaits a floor vote in the lower chamber. By law, the House cannot bring annual spending bills to the floor until May 15, unless Congress first reaches an accord on overall spending levels in the form of a concurrent budget resolution.
Lawmakers have not passed that resolution this year, because the House, where all budget proposals must originate, has not produced one. That leaves an air of uncertainty about the annual appropriations process, which seldom goes smoothly even in years in which the White House is not up for grabs.
A spokesperson for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Thursday a budget resolution could appear on the floor as soon as Monday, and that no appropriations bills have been scheduled for floor votes.
The 2016 U.S. budget year ends Sept. 30. If Congress and the White House cannot agree on fiscal 2017 appropriations before then, lawmakers will have to put together a stopgap spending measure known as a continuing resolution that would freeze federal budgets at 2016 levels and prohibit agencies from starting any new programs until Congress approves a permanent 2017 budget.
If Congress can agree on a budget resolution and avoid further ideological divides during budget debates, the House and Senate can turn their attention to ironing out the relatively minor differences in their proposed DOE budgets.
For legacy nuclear waste cleanup managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the Senate’s bill would provide some $6.4 billion for fiscal 2017 — 2 percent more than the current appropriation, 4 percent more than the White House requested, and 3 percent more than what House appropriators have proposed for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
The biggest differences between the House and Senate bills for legacy waste cleanup are the spending levels proposed for river corridor and central plateau cleanup at the former Hanford Site plutonium production complex near Richland, Wash., and the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
In the Senate’s bill, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) bumped the budget for DOE’s Richland Operations Office at Hanford to roughly $840 million — about 9 percent below 2016 levels, but 17 percent more than requested and 11 percent more than the House would provide.
The increases in the Senate’s bill for Richland would come at the expense of DOE’s Idaho Site and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. WIPP, the underground salt mine, is DOE’s only disposal facility for equipment and material contaminated by elements heavier than uranium. The Idaho National Laboratory has more of that kind of waste, also called transuranic waste, than any other site in the DOE weapons complex. House appropriators propose $382 million for Idaho and $292 million for WIPP in fiscal 2017: respectively, 5 percent and 6 percent more than the Senate bill would provide.
The Senate and House also differed on the fate of the MOX facility under construction at Savannah River. Both chambers produced bills that would deny the White House’s request to halt construction on the facility, which is still legally a part of an arms-control pact the White House sealed with Russia in 2010.
Under that deal, the MOX facility would turn some 34 tons of surplus U.S. weapon-usable plutonium into fuel suitable for commercial reactors. The White House, as part of a strategy it calls dilute and dispose, would prefer instead to reduce the plutonium’s potency and mix it into inert materials for disposal at WIPP.
The Senate bill would provide $270 million for MOX in the next budget, while the House would keep funding even with the 2016 appropriation at $340 million. The House bill explicitly forbids spending the MOX appropriation on anything but finishing the plant. The Senate bill contains no such language.
