House and Senate funding bills are far apart on the numbers

By David Kramer

House and Senate appropriators this week approved separate bills to fund the Department of Energy for the year that begins 1 October. Although both measures would reduce the amounts that President Obama sought for the department’s basic and applied research programs, the House version would cut far more deeply.

The $24.9 billion provided to DOE by the House measure is $4.1 billion below the White House request and compares to DOE’s current-year budget of $27 billion. The measure would halve DOE’s renewable energy programs from current-year levels, to $983 million, and would slash the $379 million requested for the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA–E) program to $50 million. The Office of Science, which supports basic research, would be reduced by $223 million from current levels, to $4.7 billion.

The Senate committee’s bill provides $28.2 billion for DOE, $1.2 billion more than the current year. Compared with the House panel’s bill, it includes $1.4 billion more for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, $500 million more for the Office of Science, and $329 million more for ARPA–E.

The Senate bill would order the establishment of an independent commission ‘to determine the extent to which the 17 Department of Energy national laboratories are appropriately configured to meet the energy and national security challenges of the 21st century,’ said Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the appropriations subcommittee that drafted the bill. The measure also would cut off funding for the DOE-funded Energy Efficient Buildings Hub, ‘because of poor management and failure to meet technical milestones,’ Feinstein said. Due to the lack of a project plan, no funding is provided for a proposed electricity systems hub, she added.

No cost, no money

The Senate measure would withhold all funding for the ITER fusion experiment project until the committee receives a baseline cost, schedule, and project scope from DOE. The House would not only provide all but $7.5 million of the $225 million requested for the US contribution to ITER, but also reverse funding cuts proposed by the White House to the domestic fusion research program and prevent the proposed shutdown of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak experiment at MIT. The House subcommittee is chaired by Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), who has been a consistent supporter of the fusion program.

Feinstein excoriated management of DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration for its inability to complete major projects on time and within budget. She cited the growth in cost for a planned plutonium fabrication facility at Los Alamos, from $660 million to $5 billion; a uranium processing plant at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant, from $600 million to $6 billion; and a mixed oxide fabrication plant at the Savannah River Site, from $1.4 billion to $7.7 billion.

If the regular process is followed, once the bills are approved by the respective chambers, they will then be reconciled by a House–Senate conference committee. In recent years, however, individual appropriations bills haven’t been enacted, but instead have been incorporated into omnibus spending bills.