Jeremy L. Dillon
WC Monitor
10/23/2015
House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) has called for greater predictability in the funding and operation of the Department of Energy’s environmental management program.
Simpson, a longtime advocate for the cleanup of DOE legacy defense nuclear sites, offered his thoughts earlier this month during a short interview with the ExchangeMonitor Publications & Forums after accepting the 2015 Leo Duffy Decisionmakers Award. The lawmaker addressed some of the challenges facing the program as it aims to remediate contamination left behind by Cold War operations.
“One of the challenges for the EM program, for example, is that when you have a program that is going to take years to do, what you need is predictability and funding, so that once you get started on a path, they can count on having those funds available,” Simpson said. “You can’t go out and hire people one year because we have better funding numbers, and then the next year lay them off because the funding numbers go back, and then hire them back two or three years down the road. This needs to be a continuous, sustainable, and level funding field for these sites, but that’s hard when you’re at a time when you have decreasing funding.”
Simpson has worked hard to ensure the necessary funding for EM makes the final budget. In the House version of the fiscal 2016 energy and water spending bill, which passed earlier this year, appropriators provided $5.9 billion for DOE-EM, about $92 million more than the department’s budget request. The bill would provide funding levels above what DOE had sought for a number of sites, including the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and the Richland Operations Office at the Hanford Site in Washington state, along with cleanup locations in Idaho, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. But the Office of River Protection at Hanford saw a decrease of $146 million while EM funding for the Savannah River Site would drop by $17 million. Congress has yet to approve a full-year budget, instead passing a continuing resolution that funds the federal government at fiscal 2015 enacted levels through Dec. 11.
Simpson received the Leo Duffy Award in recognition of his continued efforts to advance the DOE cleanup program. “This award means a lot,” Simpson said. “I’ve worked long and hard for many years with our national laboratories, particularly since we have one in Idaho. I grew up around it, and I realized the importance of the work that do. They really are jewels in our national system.”
The award, presented annually at the ExchangeMonitor Decisionmakers’ Forum, “recognizes sustained national leadership in addressing the legacy of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, protecting the environment for future generations and supporting the communities that host these vital missions.” Last year, during the inaugural presentation, former-Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) won the award for his years of work for the Hanford Site and for forming the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus.
