Hill Heat

Energy technology research and development and water projects are likely to see a significant boost over the Bush administration’s proposal in the fiscal 2009 spending bill the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee will mark up tomorrow.

The committee should have an extra $1.9 billion in funds above the president’s request, for a total of $33.27 billion, according to the annual 302(b) allocations released Friday. The bill funds the Energy Department, Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers.

Subcommittee Chairman Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) and ranking member David Hobson (R-Ohio) have stated their disapproval of cuts made in the administration’s budget requests for energy efficiency, Cold War legacy cleanup projects and the Army Corps. Democrats have also attacked a proposal to end the Energy Department’s $227 million weatherization assistance program, which DOE contends was not cost effective.

The House may seek more funding for renewable energy programs than the administration has proposed. The White House proposed increasing spending on wind energy programs by $3 million while scaling back the solar energy program by $12 million to $156 million. The administration is proposing a substantial increase in funding for biofuels programs.

The budget would boost biomass and biorefinery programs by nearly $27 million to reach $225 million, reflecting DOE’s push to make cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive by 2012.

And if recent years are any indication, Congress is also likely to rebuff the administration request to end funding for oil and gas technology R&D programs. Lawmakers have also declined to fund a proposal that would, over two decades, double the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to 1.5 billion barrels.

The White House proposal for DOE proposed a sharp increase in funding for science programs. The Office of Science would receive an increase of $749 million to reach $4.7 billion under the DOE plan. Nuclear energy, weapons and cleanup

The $1.4 billion request for nuclear energy is likely to see a cut in funding to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership – the administration’s initiative to close the nuclear fuel cycle – and perhaps in some of the nuclear research programs, as the committee has been very critical about DOE’s ability to manage and succeed at the larger, more expensive research projects.

The administration’s 79 percent boost in funding for the Nuclear Power 2010 program – funding to support the construction of the first nuclear power plants in 30 years – to $241 million may also see some cuts to offset research funds for renewable energy and efficiency. Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) and many of the committee members are significant supporters of nuclear power, which may mitigate funding decreases.

Visclosky and Hobson are likely to include language that again requires – and perhaps removes legal obstacles – to move the mixed oxide fuel fabrication project from the National Nuclear Security Administration to the full control of the Office of Nuclear Energy.

The two expressed disapproval that their request in last year’s omnibus appropriations bill to switch the program was not complied with. DOE said there were legal impediments to switching the management of the program from NNSA to the Office of Nuclear Energy, although the funding did come from there.

Like last year, subcommittee members voiced support for the full $495 million request for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository – although Visclosky did ask the director of the Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste about other options for the spent nuclear fuel during a hearing in April.

But the panel members said the DOE funding request of $5.53 billion to clean up the nuclear mess left over from the Cold War was drastically low, especially as the 3 percent cut came from major sites, including the Hanford site in Washington, Idaho National Laboratory, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and Nevada Test Site.

Visclosky said at a hearing in March that DOE keeps funding sites that do not appear to make any improvement and are riddled with bad management. “We are having the same conversation today that we did in 1998,” he said.

An additional $10 million from the request also is expected to be freed up as Visclosky and Hobson both disapprove of the “reliable replacement warhead” program – a research project to develop new nuclear warheads. Water projects

Visclosky and Obey have also been highly critical of the Bush administration’s proposed cuts to the Army Corps budget, arguing they leave one of the nation’s most critical needs underfunded.

The administration’s budget request calls for a 15 percent reduction in funding for the Army Corps from last year - from $5.6 billion to $4.6 billion - and does not include funding for new projects. That number does not include an additional $5.8 billion in emergency request funding for ongoing levee reconstruction efforts in Louisiana.

The $846 million cut is “exacerbating the operations and maintenance backlog for navigation systems vital to our economy, and delaying completion of ongoing construction projects leaving infrastructure vulnerable to failure and areas vulnerable to flooding,” Obey said earlier this year.

At a hearing, John Woodley Jr., assistant secretary of the Army’s Civil Works program, told appropriators that the reductions were a result of the administration’s attempts to “concentrate funds on those projects that give the greatest returns.”

However, he did tell a Senate panel that there were several projects that the corps could take on if given additional funding. “This budget leaves a lot of good work on the table,” Woodley said.

Members also will tackle the budget for the Bureau of Reclamation, which would lose $178 million under the White House proposal. Reclamation received $1.1 billion in fiscal 2008.

Funding for water and related resources would drop from $940 million to $779 million under the Bush proposal, a $161 million cut. The White House also proposed slicing the bureau’s California-Bay Delta restoration program by $8 million, leaving it with a budget of $32 million.

Reclamation Commissioner Robert Johnson has acknowledged the agency could use additional funding if it were available but said the president was attempting to maximize the agency’s work while balancing the federal budget by 2012.