By George Lobsenz
Congressional Democrats late Monday rolled out a fiscal year 2009 spending blueprint that provides hefty increases for the Energy Department’s basic research, energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.
Overall, Democrats smiled on DOE, providing a total of $26.9 billion for fiscal 2009, about $2.47 billion more than its FY ’08 budget and $1 billion more than was proposed by the Bush administration for the agency in FY ’09.
And while killing funding for the reliable replacement warhead–another Bush administration priority that long ago ran afoul of Congress–the Democrats were relatively generous to the National Nuclear Security Administration, the semi-autonomous DOE agency that runs the department’s nuclear weapons complex. It received $9.1 billion, up from $8.8 billion in fiscal 2008 and $32.3 million above the Bush administration’s fiscal 2009 budget proposal for NNSA. That included $6.38 billion for weapons activities, up $82 million from fiscal 2088.
However, the lion’s share of NNSA’s increase came in the area of nonproliferation, which received a $146.3 million bump over fiscal 2008, receiving a total of $1.48 billion. President Obama has signaled plans to raise DOE nonproliferation even more dramatically over the next few years to show his administration’s determination to address concerns about “loose nukes” in Russia and elsewhere overseas.
Also getting a big plus-up was DOE’s nuclear cleanup program, which was allocated $5.65 billion, up some $308 million from the $5.34 billion it received in fiscal 2008. That comes atop the additional $6.4 billion provided for DOE cleanup in the economic stimulus bill just passed by Congress. The increased funding appears likely to go a long way toward appeasing states hosting contaminated DOE sites who were up in arms over the Bush administration’s failure to provide funding sufficient to meet federal cleanup commitments made to those states in legally enforceable agreements.