WASHINGTON — House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced Wednesday in Washington that he was pulling his stopgap six-month GOP spending bill that would extend federal agencies’ 2024 budgets from its scheduled House floor vote.
For the Department of Energy’s civilian nuclear programs, the bill was an entirely clean continuing resolution that would have extended 2024 budgets for six months. With the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the House, Republicans would need all their members minus three to pass the bill if all Democrats voted against it.
Over the past week, enough Republicans came out against the bill to sink it if it reached the House floor, including Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who told the Monitor that the bill was “crap.”
Johnson had attempted to attach the text of a strict voter ID law to the six-month continuing resolution to attract Republicans to the bill, but there are fewer than two months until the presidential election and the leadership of the Democratic-controlled senate opposes the bill’s voter ID provisions.
If Congress and the White House do not reach an accord on 2025 spending levels by Oct. 1, the federal government will partially shut down.
In a statement Wednesday, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Ct.), the top Democratic appropriator in the House, said the leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees should “begin good-faith negotiations on a continuing resolution that will keep government programs and services Americans depend on functioning while we complete our work on full-year funding bills before the end of the 118th Congress.”
So far this year, the House and Senate appropriations committees have each approved separate DOE spending bills for 2025.
The House’s bill, stranded on the chamber floor after the majority’s right flank refused to vote for it, would provide none of the requested funding for the Integrated Waste Management System subprogram within DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. The Senate bill, which was awaiting a floor vote as of deadline for RadWaste Monitor, would meet the request of about $53 million.
The House committee’s 2025 budget proposal has more funding for the Office of Nuclear Energy than either the 2024 budget or the Senate committee’s 2025 bill.
House Appropriators approved nearly $1.8 billion for the Nuclear Energy office, about flat with the 2024 appropriation and $100 million above the 2025 request. Most of the increase, however, is unrequested funding to help develop advanced nuclear reactors.
Senate Appropriators, on the other hand, approved a little more than $1.65 billion for the office: $10 million less than the 2024 appropriation and $84 million above the request, with none of the unrequested advanced reactor funds.
