Senate clears Energy and Water bill, Agriculture up next
Lawmakers approve amendment that requires competitive bidding on projects funded by the Energy bill, with some exceptions.
The Senate Wednesday approved the $34.3 billion fiscal 2010 Energy and Water Appropriations bill, 85-9, after rejecting two amendments by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., including one requiring competitive bidding for all projects funded by the bill.
The Senate appointed as conferees the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee and Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Senate will move to the Agriculture spending bill after considering legislation to keep the Highway Trust Fund solvent. The Senate defeated the Coburn contracting amendment, 62-35.
Coburn argued that without his amendment, the earmarks in the bill would not be required to be competitively bid and would likely waste taxpayer dollars.
Coburn was critical of an alternative offered by Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., to require competitive bidding with some exceptions. The Senate approved Dorgan's amendment, 79-18.
"We have an amendment that is going to be voted on side by side, for political cover only," Coburn said. "If you vote for the Dorgan amendment, you want to continue to connect the well-heeled, the well-connected in this country and you don't want transparency and you don't want competitive bid prices on what we as Americans pay through our tax dollars for what our government buys."
Dorgan said Coburn's amendment was too broad and did not allow for unique research and development projects conducted by the Energy Department that would not lend themselves to competitive bidding.
"The people who do know [about DOE contracting] suggest that the contract competition model for some of those kinds of things doesn't work very well at all, because you are looking for things that go well beyond just who is going to bid the lowest on this kind of research -- very high-tech and exotic research that we are doing in a wide range of energy fields," Dorgan said.
The Senate also rejected, 71-26, a second amendment by Coburn to cut $13.8 million from the bill for the Energy Department. Coburn said that, according to the department's inspector general, the agency last year wasted $13.8 million in energy.
An amount "they could have saved had they done some small, simple, straightforward things like they request every other agency in the federal government to do," Coburn said. "Isn't it ironic that the very agency that is telling all the rest of the agencies to save money by becoming efficient with their computers, by becoming efficient with their heating and cooling systems, by becoming efficient by their utilization of lighting doesn't even follow their own rules."
Dorgan said that the cut is not needed because the bill provides $643 million less for the department than President Obama requested and $8 million less than fiscal 2009 level for its administration account.
The Senate Wednesday also adopted, by voice vote, a handful of amendments, including a proposal from Coburn to require public disclosure of reports from agencies to Congress called for in appropriations bills. The amendment exempts sensitive reports on national security and defense.
An amendment from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was adopted, which would direct $15 million from the $100 Energy Department industrial technologies program for technical energy grants to institutional entities, such as municipal utilities and institutions of higher learning.