House appropriators approve big cuts to DOE budget in FY 2012

On 15 June the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would slash Department of Energy spending nearly $6 billion below President Obama’s request for fiscal year 2012. The measure would bring to a sudden halt a bipartisan drive to double the budget of DOE’s Office of Science over a 10-year period, and would carve $1.9 billion out of Obama’s request for the agency’s energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. The $1.3 billion provided in the bill for those programs is nearly $500 million less than current-year spending.

The $7.1 billion the committee’s bill would provide for DOE’s nuclear weapons program is $195 million above its current level, but nearly $500 million below the Obama request. Despite applauding the new Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which provides grants for high-risk clean-energy R&D projects in the private sector, appropriators provided only $100 million of the $550 million the administration requested for ARPA–E. The bill approved just $160 million of the more than $1 billion that was requested to back up loan guarantees for the construction of nuclear and, to a lesser extent, renewable-energy power plants. In the report accompanying the bill, the committee stated that the department has sufficient existing loan guarantee authority to cover the low demand for new nuclear plants.

The $406 million provided in the bill for the civilian fusion program is a $31 million increase from the current year, and also $6 million more than the administration request. The chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), chairs the appropriations subcommittee that wrote the bill. His district is adjacent to the one that includes the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, DOE’s flagship fusion research facility.

The bill report praised DOE’s high-energy physics program for its emphasis on the ‘intensity frontier,’ saying it was an area where the US could lead the world. The appropriators were equivocal on the role that the agency should play at the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory in South Dakota, the project that NSF abandoned early this year. While cautioning DOE against taking on construction and operation of the proposed multidisciplinary laboratory at the former gold mine, the committee supported an ongoing caretaker role for the agency at DUSEL, ‘in order to preserve it as an option while [DOE] weighs the alternatives.’

The $1.7 billion provided for DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences program is $297 million below the administration’s request. The report instructs BES to terminate $25 million worth of its multiyear research projects, based upon the results of a ‘performance ranking’ of all BES-sponsored research at universities, the national laboratories, the 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, or the three Energy Innovation Hubs. Appropriators described the ranking exercise as a ‘first step towards increasing the accountability and effectiveness’ of the BES program. They said the bulk of BES’s research portfolio ‘lacks transparency to the public and to the Congress,’ and that sponsored projects are not held accountable for results. The bill provides $20 million for a new hub that will be focused on batteries and energy storage.

The energy and water development bill was the fifth of the 12 annual appropriations bills to be approved by the full House committee. Senate appropriators have yet to move any of their spending bills. Given that Republicans control the House, and Democrats the Senate, the amounts established in the House bills are likely to represent the funding floor for the House–Senate conference committees that will reconcile the two versions of each spending measure later this year.

David Kramer