The Donald Trump administration on Monday rolled out its full fiscal 2020 budget request for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, which faces a roughly $700 million funding decrease from the current level.
Overall, funding for the cleanup office would drop from almost $7.2 billion in fiscal 2019 to about $6.5 billion proposed for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. Defense environmental cleanup funding would decline from just over $6 billion to $5.5 billion; non-defense environmental cleanup would go from $310 million to $247 million; and Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) money would go from $841 million to $715 million.
The two field offices at DOE’s largest and most complex Cold War remediation location, the Hanford Site in Washington state, would see their combined budgets slashed by roughly $416 million.
Among other key sites
The Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico, which oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), would take a $5 million haircut, from $403 million to $398 million.
Funding for Idaho National Laboratory cleanup would drop almost $96 million, from $443 million to about $348 million.
The budget for environmental remediation at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee would drop by $217 million, $646 million to about $429 million.
Conversely, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would enjoy a $91 million increase from roughly $1.55 billion to $1.64 billion, including a $47 million uptick in tank waste management funding.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry is scheduled to appear before the House and Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittees today and Wednesday to discuss the $31.7 billion agency budget.
