The Senate Appropriations Committee easily advanced its Energy-Water fiscal 2019 spending bill on Thursday, rejecting Trump administration efforts to reduce funding for energy and science research.
The $43.8 billion bill, approved by a 30-1 vote, is $566 million more than this year’s appropriation and $7.2 billion more than the administration requested.
It includes a record $6.65 billion for the Energy Department’s Office of Science and increases funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, to $375 million.
ARPA-E is a program with bipartisan support in Congress that funds innovations in energy technology, such as battery storage. President Trump in his fiscal 2019 budget proposed to eliminate the program for the second year in a row.
The agency was created by a law signed by President George W. Bush.
A National Academies of Sciences assessment from last year said ARPA-E “has made significant contributions to energy R&D that likely would not take place absent the agency’s activities.”
It cited 74 patents granted and 36 companies founded based on ARPA-E-funded research.
“I would tell President Trump and the Office of Management and Budget that science, research, and innovation is what made America first, and I recommend that he add science, research, and innovation to his ‘America First’ agenda,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee. “This funding bill is a good first step to doing that — it prioritizes federal spending to keep America first in energy research and increases funding to develop the next generation of supercomputers.”
The Energy Department’s office of energy efficiency and renewable energy is funded at $2.3 billion, equal to the amount in fiscal 2018.
Trump, who has promoted expanded fossil fuel development, had sought to cut funding for renewable energy such as wind and solar.
Fossil fuels also get a boost in the appropriations bill.
The Energy Department’s fossil fuels office gets $727 million, $183,000 above the fiscal 2018 level and $225 million more than Trump’s budget request, for technologies to advance coal, natural gas, and oil.
Nuclear energy research and development will also receive more money than Trump asked for, $1.2 billion, the same as the fiscal 2018 amount and $449 million above the budget request.
“The measure provides resources to strengthen the U.S. nuclear deterrence posture, ensure nuclear stockpile readiness and safety, and prepare for existing and future nuclear threats,” the Appropriations Committee said in a press release after the bill passed.
The bill also includes a to-be-determined funding amount for a pilot interim nuclear waste storage facility, that would be used until Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is approved by regulators and funded by Congress, if it ever is, as the nation’s permanent repository for nuclear waste. The Senate movement on the issue comes after the House this month passed by a wide bipartisan margin a bill that would direct the Energy Department to create a temporary storage program.
“We can’t let another year go by with no movement on nuclear waste,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., during the Appropriations Committee markup of the bill.
The Appropriations Committee wants to approve all 12 spending bills before the July Fourth recess.
