Watchers of the Department of Energy’s defense nuclear waste and weapons budgets will endure two more weeks of added uncertainty about those programs after Congress blew town for an extended spring break without making progress on a deal to avert automatic spending cuts that will kick in on Oct. 1.
The House did make an opening gambit of sorts before leaving Washington, D.C., passing a resolution with non-binding budget caps that at least least let the lower chamber’s appropriators write budget bills — bills that the majority may need to fight its own left-leaning progressive caucus to pass.
In a resolution passed last week, the House told its appropriators to mark up fiscal 2020 spending bills with a defense spending cap of about $730 billion and a non-defense spending cap of $630 billion. Those are, respectively, 2% less and 10% more than the White House seeks for those broad categories of federal spending.
Most DOE nuclear programs are part of the defense discretionary spending category. These include the nuclear weapons programs managed by the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and most of the cleanup of former nuclear weapons sites managed by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management (EM).
For DOE’s defense-nuclear programs, the White House proposed an 8% increase for the NNSA, to about $16.5 billion, and a 10% cut for EM budget, to under $6.5 billion. Under the House plan, those budgets would compete with each other, and the entire Pentagon budget, for almost $20 billion less funding than the Trump administration asked Congress to make available.
Energy Department programs that deal with civilian nuclear waste, as well as the entire budget for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are non-defense discretionary spending. These programs — into which the proposed, White House-supported, Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada figures heavily — face the same partisan gridlock they did last year and might not be funded as requested, even if a deal on spending caps materializes out of thin air.
Congress will not return to work until April 29, but media reported last week that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) directed their staff to start hashing out a compromise on spending caps.
Without a deal on budget caps, Congress might be forced to pass another continuing resolution that would pinch major construction projects across the weapons complex and the nuclear security enterprise. But even a deal on caps will require the White House’s support to avert a stopgap spending bill in October.
