Senate panel boosts funding for nuke weapons facilities

Signaling anew that it believes the Cold War remains alive and kicking, a Senate subcommittee last week approved a $22.5 billion energy and water bill that squeezes spending for congressionally coveted pork barrel projects in order to boost spending for nuclear weapons facilities.

In rapid-fire fashion on Thursday, the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development whisked the bulky bill, by voice vote, to the full committee. The committee is expected to take it up Tuesday, and panel leaders hope there will be enough time to get it to the Senate floor for a vote before members break camp on July 29 for national party conventions in Philadelphia (GOP) and Los Angeles (Democrats) next month.

Many members are especially anxious to get the bill (H.R. 4733) through Congress and thus claim bragging rights for bringing home water projects in advance of the fall election campaigns.

The Senate's version of the bill tops spending in a similar House bill by some $700 million. But most of that extra money appears to go for improvements in safeguarding nuclear weapons secrets and for upgrading time-worn weapons development and storage facilities, mostly in New Mexico, Texas, Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri.

The bill also boosts spending for environmental cleanup efforts at weapons plants in Hanford, Wash., and Savannah River, S.C.

Subcommittee chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., said spending for defense projects in fiscal 2001 was set at nearly $13.5 billion-$400 million more than President Clinton requested and almost $1.4 billion higher than this year.

At the same time, he explained, non-defense projects took a slight cut in order to make room for the added defense spending. Those local projects, ranging from dams and impoundments to harbor dredging and irrigation systems, would be funded at $8.9 billion- $73 million less than this year and $603 million below the president's mark.

He also indicated that President Clinton is not going to like the way the Senate bill turned out, since lawmakers supplanted many of his non-defense water projects with favorites of their own. Domenici characterized these changes as the result of "some very legitimate requests from members" of Congress.

The New Mexico Republican also warned that some members are going to be disappointed when the closely-held bill is finally revealed to the public (the subcommittee refused to make copies available on Thursday). "We have included no (money) for new construction starts or new initiatives (in 2001), and only a very limited number of new studies or planning projects," Domenici said. Nor, he added, does the bill include water and sewer projects authorized in the 1999 Water Resources Development Act or any "unauthorized projects" from other legislation.

It does, however, include a Domenici provision that environmentalists complained would ensure the extinction of the last colony of silvery minnows downstream from a dam on the Rio Grande River. The senator's amendment, according to Heather Weiner, an attorney with Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, would bar the release of sufficient water from an irrigation impoundment pool behind the dam to keep the fish alive.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy's non-defense programs took some hits in the subcommittee's bill. Science programs got $2.92 billion, about $242 million less than the president requested although $133 million more than this year. More than half of that increase, however, was ticketed for a single item in Tennessee-the Spallation Neutron Source research project.

Other science projects were not so lucky. The subcommittee cut back funding for high energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy research. The fusion project, in particular, is prized by energy policy mavens, who believe it could eventually provide an inexhaustible source of energy if the key to harnessing fusion power could be found.

The subcommittee's bill also contains:

• $4.1 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers, $41 million more than the president sought but $22 million below this year's level.
• $753 million for the Bureau of Reclamation, $48 million less than Clinton asked for and $13 million below this year.