Following the lead of the House of Representatives earlier this month, the U.S. Senate voted 65-to-27 Thursday evening to approve a short-term spending deal to keep the federal government open through March 11.
President Joe Biden was expected to sign the latest continuing resolution (CR) in order to prevent a government shutdown today while Democrats and Republicans in both chambers plan to wrap up a permanent spending plan for the rest of fiscal year 2022, which ends Sept. 30.
The approval of the three-week funding patch came after Democrats fended off a pair of Republican-sponsored amendments, including plans to block enforcement of federal employee COVID-19 vaccine mandates and any orders directing young school children to be inoculated against the illness that had as of Friday claimed more than 930,000 lives.
The first amendment, by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), failed 47-46 and the second, proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), failed 49-to-44. A separate amendment to attach a balanced-budget-act provision to the bill also failed.
The Thursday vote occurred without a handful of Democrats, including New Mexico’s Ben Ray Lujan who is recovering from a stroke, and a couple of Republicans, who were unavailable for various reasons, CNN noted.
For the most part, the CR keeps fiscal 2022 funding at fiscal 2021 levels. This includes $19.7 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration, $7.6 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and $1.5 billion for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. The bill does provide an increased funding exception for Environmental Management’s Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning fund.
A number of Republicans with DOE nuclear cleanup facilities in their states ended up voting for the final continuing resolution. Some who voted against it included Lee of Utah, Sens. Mike Crapo and James Risch of Idaho, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
