ECA Update: April 23, 2013
Published: Tue, 04/23/13
Senate panel to consider Manhattan Project National Historical Park Act today at 2:30 PM
ECA April 23, 2:30 PM WEBCAST The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks will hold a hearing today at 2:30 PM to consider testimony from the National Park Service and Department of Energy regarding a number of National Park bills, including the Manhattan Project National Historical Park Act (S. 507).
The hearing will be webcast live on the committee's website, and an archived video will be available shortly after the hearing is complete.
Witnesses
Ms. Peggy O'Dell
Deputy Director for Operations National Park Service, Department of the Interior Ms. Ingrid Kolb
Director Office of Management, Department of Energy Steven Chu has left the building
Ben Geman, The Hill April 23, 2013 Steven Chu is no longer the secretary of Energy.
Monday was the final day of Chu's four-year-plus tenure at the Energy Department (DOE).
He's heading back to California to teach at Stanford University, where he was a professor from 1987-2004.
At DOE, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist oversaw expanded federal support for low-carbon energy, and defended it against GOP attacks when some of the efforts stumbled.
Chu announced his intention to leave DOE in early February. Click here for more E2-Wire coverage of Chu's sometimes rocky tenure at DOE.
He was the longest-serving secretary in DOE history.
Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman has stepped into Chu's shoes on an acting basis while senators get around to confirming Ernest Moniz, the nominee to replace Chu.
Moniz, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist, is likely to win full Senate approval soon after sailing through the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in a bipartisan 21-1 vote last week.
Poneman's first day as acting secretary will include a Capitol Hill event with the directors of DOE's various "Energy Innovation Hubs"that were established under Chu. Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) is hosting the event.
DOE put together a retrospective of Chu's tenure here.
Hill's newest earmarks: Sequester exemptions Darren Samuelsohn, Politico April 22, 2013 Sequestration exemptions are shaping up to be Washington's newest version of earmarks.
Agencies, companies and other groups are on the hunt for Capitol Hill allies with the juice to save their pet issues from the full force of the across-the-board cuts. Some have already been successful.
The campaigns are just one example of Washington slipping back into business-as-usual, where powerful players are open to satisfying special interests, even on sequester -- which wasn't supposed to play favorites.
"This parochial interest nature of Congress is re-emerging in, I think, an unseemly way," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
"We're moving into some dangerous territory if we just allow every member to pick areas that they think ought to be changed," added Sen. Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who made a name for himself in the House by ridiculing earmarks in appropriations bills.
Not everyone will get lucky. The money has to come from somewhere, and any increases for one program mean someone else loses. Granting more get-out-of-jail-free cards from sequestration also undermines the very nature of the budget cuts that were designed in the first place to be equally brutal for everyone, with no simple out.
The Obama administration has led the charge with exceptions, finding flexibility that it previously said it didn't have. Pentagon officials have said they already plan to scale back the number of furlough days for civilian employees from 22 to 14, and Navy officials say they even could skip forcing staff to take days off entirely and still meet their budget-cut quota.
In some instances, department heads have even found unused pots of money that allow them to toss a lifeline to their employees, like Attorney General Eric Holder's decision last month to use his "limited authorities" to transfer $150 million to keep federal prison guards from being furloughed. Their absence, Holder said in a memo to Justice Department employees, would have "created serious threats to the lives and safety of our staff, inmates and the public."
On Capitol Hill, public safety -- already on high alert after last week's double bombing at the Boston Marathon -- seems poised to be used as a rallying cry to save homeland security-themed budgets, including Transportation Security Administration guards and FBI agents.
"It clearly reinforces the case to make sure all the essential functions of homeland security are fully funded," Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), the ranking member of the Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, told POLITICO.
Drug companies and medical device manufacturers say they're looking for a sequestration exemption on the user fees they pay to support their application reviews at the Food and Drug Administration. Under current law, about $85 million in their fiscal year 2013 payments are being redirected from FDA's coffers to the Treasury Department.
But any efforts to disconnect the money from sequestration hinges on lawmakers finding an offset and also in avoiding a rush among hundreds of other user fee programs -- highways and pesticides to name two -- who also may want out of the current setup.
"We think we do rise to the top of the priority list, but we recognize that Congress has to figure out how to deal with us differently than the other user-fee programs," said JC Scott, head of government affairs at AdvaMed, a major medical device trade group.
Pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers say they're unsure whether they'll get their best chance at an exemption through regular order on appropriations bills or via the authorizing committees, so they're targeting pretty much all the key lawmakers, including House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who has the FDA headquarters in her state.
"We want to make sure we're part of the discussions from Day One as they begin the contemplation of bills, so we have a foothold to cling to whatever gets signed into law," said a GOP health care lobbyist.
On Capitol Hill, meat inspectors and a popular military tuition program offer textbook examples on how to skirt sequestration as the two main items to score reprieves in last month's continuing resolution that President Barack Obama signed into law.
Both issues had bipartisan sponsors who moved quickly to get their cause on the docket. And both also tugged at the heartstrings of fellow lawmakers, with warnings of soldiers unable to register for classes and threats of food shortages and Americans getting sick from eating tainted food.
"It was the right thing to do," said Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who joined with Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) on the tuition amendment.
"I think we made a compelling case that this directly impacted the private sector," said Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who partnered with Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) on the meatpacker language that won voice-vote approval with an offset targeting a school breakfast grant program popular with the White House. "When you were furloughing the meat inspectors, you were furloughing a whole plant. I think that's true. We had the facts to back it up."
Other issues still simmering as possible candidates for sequester exemptions include the National Institutes of Health, where scientists fret that funding lapses will undercut the continuity needed for key areas of research. NIH advocates say they're optimistic after House Democrats and Senate Republicans expressed interest in beefing up the institute's spending levels during last month's budget resolution debate.
Air traffic control furloughs started Sunday, but nearly 150 towers at small and medium-size airports around the country still face a mid-June deadline before the Federal Aviation Administration plans to shut them down. And while Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) fell short in getting an exemption attached to the CR, he's still pushing stand-alone legislation that includes more than a dozen Democratic co-sponsors and won support earlier this month from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) also added an amendment to the nonbinding Senate budget resolution aimed at saving the airport control towers.
Budget writers, likewise, have their own ideas about what to do with sequestration. Obama's fiscal year '14 budget request released earlier this month presumed the cuts would be averted as part of its 10-year spending blueprint. House Republicans kept sequestration intact in their resolution, though they shifted some of the cuts off the Pentagon and onto other domestic agencies. The Senate-passed resolution replaced the across-the-board cuts over a decade with a mixture of new revenue and spending cuts split evenly between defense and nondefense programs.
Powerful appropriators -- who bumped up spending in the CR for the Pentagon, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, the FDA, National Science Foundation and NASA -- say they're also itching at the chance to dish out funding levels as they see fit.
"Let us make the decisions. Not the meat ax," Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told POLITICO. "We have to look at the meritorious programs, not because I want it or he wants it or she wants or she needs it. We'll ask, 'What is essential to America?'"
But other members aren't so sure their colleagues should start tampering with sequestration. They fear it'll have a ripple effect on other agencies and note how getting the offsets just right hasn't proven to be easy. The meatpackers' amendment added to the Senate's version of the CR, for example, included a drafting error that meant budget officials had to make an additional $30 million in cuts from other agencies besides the Department of Agriculture, including on education, NIH and the Pentagon.
"Everybody's ox is being gored," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who complained about a number of exemptions already written into the law for big-ticket items like Social Security and Medicare. "The more you exempt things, the more damage it does to the remaining programs, and unfortunately that happens to be a lot of defense."
Health budget advocate Emily Holubowich said she expects Washington consultants will be marketing themselves more and more as experts in how to obtain exemptions. Likewise, she expects lawmakers won't have any qualms proclaiming themselves back home as a program's savior, even if they aren't all successful.
"This becomes the new symbolic thing, to be responsive to constituents who are upset about sequestration," she said.
House Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said the only way the sequester should be changed is if it's undone in its entirety. "Otherwise, it's just a race to see who's got more political weight in the process," he said. "And if that's the measure, then there's a lot of important priorities that have less powerful constituencies that will lose out and that's just not right. That's not the right way to proceed."
Gearing up for DOE's FY2015 cleanup budget Frank Munger, Atomic City Underground April 19, 2013 The Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge Environmental Mangement program will host a public workshop April 23 to discuss cleanup priorities for the Fiscal Year 2015 federal budget.
The workshop will be held from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Pollard Auditorium on the campus of Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
Mark Whitney, DOE's environmental chief in Oak Ridge, said in a statement, "As taxpayer stewards, I think these public meetings are a responsible practice that increase transparency and explain our decision process. These meetings also provide a forum for residents and stakeholders to voice their opinions, suggestions, and concerns about our vision."
After DOE's presentations at the meeting, there will be a public comment period.
Salt Processing Reaches First of Two 2013 Contract Milestones Savannah River Remediation Press Release April 18, 2013 AIKEN, S.C. (April 18, 2013) - Savannah River Remediation (SRR) has reached a contract milestone for 2013 by processing over 600,000 gallons of salt waste through its Interim Salt Disposition Process at the Savannah River Site (SRS).
The milestone was reached on March 23, 2013, when 600,000 gallons were processed through salt dispositioning, which includes the Actinide Removal Process (ARP) and Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit (MCU). The ARP and MCU work as an integrated system to remove nearly all of the radioactive isotopes from the salt waste portion of the SRS's radioactive waste in storage tanks.
The chemical isotopes removed by ARP / MCU include cesium, plutonium and strontium. These isotopes are transferred to the Defense Waste Processing Facility, where it is blended with a borosilicate frit and melted to form a molten glass mixture that is poured in stainless steel canisters, which are stored at SRS awaiting permanent storage.
The decontaminated salt solution from salt dispositioning is transferred to the Saltstone facilities for disposition.
Achieving these milestones continues to prove the effectiveness of salt waste processing at SRS, according to Terrel Spears, Assistant Manager for Waste Disposition Project, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-Savannah River Operations Office.
"I congratulate SRR for reaching this initial milestone," Spears said. "Processing salt waste is essential for us and our mission to close tanks. The salt processing technologies utilized have proven very effective in removing the radioactive constituents from salt waste."
Dave Olson, SRR President and Project Manager, said salt waste constitutes 90 percent of the total waste inventory stored in SRR's two tank farms, and the removal and processing of the waste is key in SRR achieving its mission to close tanks.
"The milestone demonstrates the safe and continuous operations of a key component in the waste removal process at SRS," Olson said.
SRS is owned by DOE. The SRS Liquid Waste contract is managed by SRR, a team of companies led by URS Corp. with partners Bechtel National, CH2M Hill and Babcock & Wilcox. Critical subcontractors for the contract are AREVA, Energy Solutions and URS Professional Solutions.
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