The Energy Department’s Cold War nuclear-cleanup budget would rise more than 5 percent in fiscal 2018 to the highest inflation-adjusted level in nearly 10 years, if a federal budget proposed Thursday by the Trump administration becomes law.
The White House proposed a roughly $6.5 billion budget for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) for the budget year beginning Oct. 1, even as the administration advocated cutting DOE’s overall top line by more than 5 percent to $28 billion.
The last time EM cracked the $6.5-billion mark was in 2010, when DOE and much of the rest of the federal government benefited from extra infrastructure spending in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — commonly known as the stimulus.
However, the White House’s so-called “skinny budget” did not include the detailed spending breakdown slated to appear with the formal budget request to Congress in May. On Thursday, the administration said only that its spending plan would “advance the Environmental Management program mission of cleaning up the legacy of waste and contamination from energy research and nuclear weapons production, including addressing excess facilities to support modernization of the nuclear security enterprise.”
The head of an advocacy group for communities that host DOE cleanups praised the proposed budget increase for these activities.
“Throughout the transition we heard how EM is a priority and the President’s budget reflects the importance of the program,” Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of the Energy Communities Alliance, said by email Thursday.
As for the White House’s statement regarding addressing excess facilities in the Environmental Management budget, Kirshenberg speculated that perhaps “DOE is identifying that it may move more NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration] facilities that are no longer being used by NNSA but are currently under the jurisdiction and the budget of NNSA to EM. This is a large budget item that would free up more funds for NNSA while creating more costs for EM.”
The distinguishing feature of the White House’s proposed budget is a $54-billion increase for defense and homeland security spending within the government’s discretionary budget — the part of federal spending that does not include social safety net programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The discretionary funding cuts would be paid for, under the Trump budget blueprint, by substantial cuts to the State Department, the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Within DOE, the proposed budget would slash nearly $3 billion in funding from the Office of the Undersecretary for Science and Energy, which includes fossil fuel and nuclear energy research.
Whether President Donald Trump’s proposals become law is ultimately up to Congress, where lawmakers from both parties quickly made their concerns known about various parts of the plan.
“We will not balance the budget by cutting discretionary spending, which is only 31 percent of spending and is already under control because of earlier budget acts,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development committee, said in prepared comments. “Runaway entitlement spending — more than 60 percent of spending — is the real cause of the $20 trillion federal debt.”
“The power of the purse ultimately lies with Congress, and it is Congress that will need to strike the balance between cutting unnecessary programs and protecting vital ones that foster economic growth and increase national security,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, wrote in a prepared statement.
