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 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 measure includes some $12.9 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration, within which is $9.3 billion for weapons activities and $1.8 billion for defense nuclear nonproliferation – the same overall level of NNSA funding as in the House version. A major point of departure between the two bills is in their treatment of the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which is intended to turn 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under a nonproliferation agreement with Russia.
The Senate bill provides $270 million for MOX construction and gives the secretary of energy reprogramming authority to allocate funds from one construction project to another, or to change the scope of an approved project. Senate appropriators last month asked the Senate Armed Services Committee to schedule a hearing about the MOX approach, though there is still no indication of a hearing date.
Meanwhile, the House bill allocates $340 million for MOX and prohibits the use of the funding to place the plant in “cold standby,” or suspended with the option to resume activity. This is in stark contrast to President Barack Obama’s budget proposal to terminate MOX in favor of a different plutonium dilution and disposal method, for which his budget would grant $285 million. The Obama administration, estimating that MOX would cost more than $50 billion over its lifetime, now argues that an alternative approach could save years of work and tens of billions of dollars.
The House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee mark of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) calls for MOX construction to continue unless the secretary of energy submits an updated performance baseline for the project; notification of consultations with Russia on an alternative method; a commitment to remove plutonium from South Carolina; and either a notification that the MOX contractor has not submitted a contract proposal to complete construction, or certification that an alternative option exists that would cost less than half the estimated MOX life-cycle cost.
The full House is set to consider its version of the NDAA next week. The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday passed its version of the bill, which is expected to be taken up by the full Senate in several weeks.
The Senate’s energy and water bill is technically an amendment to the House’s 2017 Energy and Water 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 written 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 2017.
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor reporter Alissa Tabirian contributed to this report.
