With members of the House out of town this week, Congress made little progress on authorizing and appropriating government funding, including measures covering the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
However, Armed Services Committee staffers worked behind the scenes this week to hash out differences in the House and Senate versions of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.
The “Big Four” authorizers, Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, are likely to meet next week to catch up on where negotiations stand, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters this week.
Inhofe also said that he had not yet reviewed a compromise NDAA presented to him last week by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the House Armed Services chair.
Smith has said Democrats would not support authorizing any Pentagon funding to build President Donald Trump’s proposed southern border wall. As late as last weekend, Trump would not rule out allowing the government to shut down rather than signing a funding bill without money for the wall to keep the government operating once the current stopgap measure expires on Nov. 21, Government Executive and other news organizations reported.
Fiscal 2020 began on Oct. 1 with the House having passed most of its appropriations bills but the Senate approving none. Congress instead passed a continuing resolution that Trump signed on Sept. 27, keeping federal spending levels at prior-year levels.
That leaves the NRC funded at the annualized level slightly over $910 million to carry out its mission of regulating commercial nuclear waste and power operations. That is $10 million less than it requested for fiscal 2020, but more than the $900 million offered by the House or the roughly $855 million recommended by the Senate.
House and Senate appropriators rejected the administration’s request for about $150 million to resume licensing of the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear waste repository at the Energy Department (the applicant) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the licensor). The 2008 DOE application has been on ice for about a decade after the Obama administration defunded the proceeding.
Lawmakers instead focused funding to advance interim storage of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants as a means for the Energy Department to expedite its congressional mandate to dispose of that material and high-level radioactive waste.
Both congressional NDAAs also rejected the administration’s request to authorize $26 million for defense nuclear waste disposal – which would have gone to Yucca licensing.
Wall funding is only one of the sticking points in Smith’s negotiations with the White House, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said this week.
Smith has “let us know he’s talking to them … that’s what he’s indicated to us,” Reed told reporters Tuesday. “If it was just one issue, we would almost be there.”
Reed echoed Inhofe’s indication that a Big Four meeting would be imminent. In the meantime, “we’re hoping that the staff can continue to narrow the differences,” he said.
Inhofe said the prospect of passing a so-called “skinny NDAA” for fiscal 2020, as opposed to a full bill, would be better known in December. He re-emphasized that that would be a last resort to pass the bare minimum of authorizations for the U.S. military.
Meanwhile, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told reporters this week that he plans to work with his House Democratic counterpart, House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), to try to speed up the appropriations process for outstanding fiscal 2020 spending bills, including those funding the Pentagon and the Department of Energy.
Most immediately, the two lead appropriators will need to agree upon a deadline for a new continuing resolution as Congress now has less than a week’s worth of legislative days before the current continuing resolution expires. Absent a new stopgap deal, the government would shut down on Nov. 22.
Dan Leone, staff reporter for the ExchangeMonitor, contributed to this story from Washington.
