With Congressional Republicans threatening to thwart a stopgap funding plan to keep the government running beyond Thursday, the Department of Energy and other agencies could be forced to suspend operations.
The DOE declined comment Tuesday, directing inquiries to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which did not immediately respond by Weapons Complex Morning Briefing’s deadline.
Thursday is the first day of fiscal 2022, and absent a continuing budget resolution, agencies will start to at least partially shut down due to a lapse in funding. The last federal government shutdown, the longest of the last several, ran from Dec. 22, 2018 until Jan. 25, 2019.
During the Donald Trump administration the DOE filed a plan with OMB saying probably 73% of its workforce would be sent home in the event of a shutdown. This time around, many feds are already home teleworking due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They could presumably lose pay, although Congress has in the past paid feds for lost wages once the shutdown ended.
The stopgap budget, or continuing resolution, that Senate Republicans filibustered this week would keep most federal budgets at 2021 levels through Dec. 3. The bill did, however, provide an exception for uranium enrichment cleanup at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which the White House said needed to exceed 2021 spending to keep cleanup at the Portsmouth, Paducah and Oak Ridge sites on the rails.
That was the only spending exception that would be necessary for DOE nuclear-weapon sites, the White House has said. Senate Republicans declined to support the bill because it would raise the U.S. debt limit — a necessary step to service debts the country already owes.
Meanwhile, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) will follow the same “hiatus” plan from 2019, said Tara Tadlock, the associate director for board operations. The plan would keep on only about 14 of the board’s 102 staff members deemed necessary “to protect life and property.”
How much pain an individual site will feel in a shut down comes down to whether that site is allowed to use unspent “carryover” funds, an industry source in the DOE weapons complex said. Typically, most DOE nuclear cleanup sites have enough unspent funds on hand to keep open some essential operations going two or more weeks.
“We stay in close contact with our clients to see what is happening,” a second contractor executive said. “There is not a lot we can do.”
