[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 61 (Wednesday, April 20, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2290-S2294]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT APPROPRIATIONS BILL

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in the next few minutes, Senator 
Feinstein and I will submit for the Senate's consideration the first 
appropriations bill of the year. This will be the Energy and Water 
appropriations bill. It will be the earliest that any appropriations 
bill has been submitted since the Budget Act was passed in 1974. This 
is a good sign for the Senate. It means we are serious about our most 
basic constitutional responsibilities, which is the oversight of the 
spending of money, the setting of priorities, and doing it in a way 
that allows every Senator to participate.
  I am privileged to be able to work with Senator Feinstein, who is 
able to come to a result after we have examined an important piece of 
legislation. She has a background as a manager, as a mayor, as a 
chairman of important committees, and I am very privileged to have the 
chance to work with her, whether we are in the majority or the 
minority.
  Before I talk about the bill specifically, since this is the first 
bill, I wish to say a few words about the money we are spending. This 
year the Budget Control Act, which the Senate adopted in 2015--which 
was the law passed by the Senate by a vote of 64 to 35, October 30 of 
last year. This year the Budget Control Act sets the amount of money we 
are to spend at $1.07 trillion. Our bill, the Energy and Water bill, 
will be $37.5 billion of that approximately $1 trillion. However, the 
entire Federal budget is a lot more than $1 trillion. In fact, it is 
four times as much. The entire Federal budget this year is $3.9 
trillion--nearly $4 trillion.
  We are talking about appropriated dollars of about $1 trillion, plus 
about 3 trillion other dollars we will spend this year through the 
Federal Government. Those dollars are what we call mandatory or 
automatic spending, plus interest on the debt.
  Federal health care spending, as an example, is about $1 trillion. It 
is about the same amount as all of the 12 appropriations bills that 
will be considered. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services head, 
Mr. Slavitt, is in charge of spending about $886 billion every year--
almost all mandatory spending. The part of the budget we are talking 
about, and we will be talking about for the next 12 weeks, is one-
fourth of the total Federal spending.
  I thank Senator McConnell, the majority leader, for making this a 
priority. I thank Senator Reid, the Democratic leader, for suggesting 
to Senator McConnell and to all of us on behalf of the Democrats that 
they, too, want to see us move through the process. This gives the 
American people a chance to see how we spend their money.
  The American people care about how we spend their money because we 
have a big debt. There is a lot of talk about that debt, which is $19 
trillion. This year, the total revenues of the Federal

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Government are about $3.36 billion, but the spending is about $3.9 
trillion. Elementary school mathematics will show we are adding about 
$534 billion more to our $19 trillion debt this year.
  It is important to point out that the spending we are talking about 
in this bill and the other 11 discretionary bills is not the problem. I 
would like to ask the Chair to look at the bottom line, the blue line. 
That is what we call the discretionary spending. That is the money the 
Appropriations Committee works on. That is the trillion dollars we are 
appropriating in these bills.
  It has been flat since 2008, and it is rising at about the rate of 
inflation over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget 
Office. If the entire budget had followed the path of that blue line on 
the bottom--that is the money we are in charge of in the Appropriations 
Committee--we would not have a debt problem. Look where the debt 
problem is coming from. That is the automatic mandatory spending, that 
red line. That does not even include the interest on the Federal debt. 
I have suggested in our conference that maybe what the Senate would 
want to do is turn the entire budget over to the Appropriations 
Committee because we are doing our job, and apparently the rest of the 
Senate--or all of us as a whole--is not doing its job and is running up 
a big Federal debt.
  Senator Feinstein and I have been presented an amount of money by the 
committee and by the Senate that we allocate. We have done that through 
four hearings. I will be talking about that. We have set priorities, we 
have cut wasteful spending, and we are beginning to get big 
construction projects under control.
  We have eliminated funding for an infusion project in France. That 
saves $125 million in a year, which we can then put on other 
priorities. We have the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, TN, 
now on a project where it will be 90 percent designed before it is 
built, and it will be on time and on budget before it is finished.
  We are working with the Armed Services Committee to try to do 
something similar with a mock facility in South Carolina. We have a red 
team--the kind of red team that helped us at Oak Ridge and South 
Carolina--working on the New Mexico construction projects. Working 
together, our oversight is saving the taxpayers money, staying within 
the budget, and I am glad to say we are not part of the debt problem.
  Sometimes we as a full Senate will start working on that top line. 
Senator Corker and I have a bill that would reduce that top-line growth 
by $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The problem is, Senator Corker 
and I are the only cosponsors of the bill, so we will not be talking 
about that much today.
  I understand there may be an attempt to change the level of funding 
that we make, and I will talk about that at the time this afternoon 
when the amendments come up. So everybody is thinking about that 
beforehand, No. 1, we are following the law. That is where our 
budgeting is. No. 2, the Budget Committee of the Senate has begun to 
start its budget process based upon the number that the law sets. No. 
3, our appropriations bills are not the debt problem. The problem is 
the mandatory spending and interest on the debt, and sooner or later we 
need to deal with it.

  Last Thursday Senator Feinstein and I and the Senate Appropriations 
Committee approved the fiscal year 2017 Energy and Water Development 
appropriations bill by a unanimous vote of 30 to nothing. Thirty of the 
100 Members of this body who are on that committee all voted for it.
  This bill includes some items very familiar to the American people, 
things that they would like for us to fund properly, such as flood 
control; navigation on our rivers; deepening harbors, whether it is in 
California, Mobile, Charleston, or Savannah; rebuilding locks, whether 
they are in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, or in inland waterways; the 17 
National Labs, which are our secret weapon in job growth across our 
country; and supercomputing. We seek to lead the world in 
supercomputing, and it is another great source of job growth.
  A big part of our budget has to do with nuclear weapons and national 
defense. At a time when our world is so unsafe, Americans are hoping we 
can deal with that.
  We worked together in a fair and accommodating manner under 
challenging fiscal strengths to create a bipartisan bill. As I said 
earlier, the sum is $37.5 billion, $355 million more than last year. 
Reaching a bipartisan consensus wasn't easy. We received an allocation 
for defense spending that was higher than last year by $1.163 billion 
but $808 million lower for the nondefense parts of our budget.
  The funding includes several Federal agencies that do important work, 
including the U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the 
National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Appalachian Regional 
Commission.
  We also started with an unrealistic budget proposal from the 
President, which cut the Corps of Engineers by $1.4 billion and 
proposed $2.3 billion in new mandatory funding for the Department of 
Energy.
  The bill Senator Feinstein and I negotiated supports our waterways 
and puts us one step closer to doubling basic energy research, helps to 
resolve the nuclear waste stalemate, cleans up hazardous material at 
Cold War sites, and maintains our nuclear weapons stockpile. We also 
conducted intensive oversight of the President's budget request and the 
Department of Energy. As I mentioned earlier, we eliminated at least 
one low-priority program which will save about $125 million to reduce 
waste. That program, the International Thermonuclear Experimental 
Reactor, is located in France and started in 2005 with an initial cost 
of $1.1 billion, but we have already invested that much and the project 
will not likely be completed until after 2025.
  As I mentioned earlier, we worked together to keep the big uranium 
projects on time and on budget. It is now on time and on budget. It 
will be 90-percent designed before it is constructed, and we are also 
working together to control the MOX facility and the facility in New 
Mexico.
  Mr. President, 77 Senators submitted requests to us, and we worked 
hard to accommodate the request of every Senator. We have had many 
other Senators who have come to us since then with amendments they 
would like to offer. Most Senators--I would say in the eighties--have 
something they think is important in this bill. If Senators decide we 
need to spend less money, I guess they need to be prepared to send us 
letters suggesting what they would like to take out of the bill, since 
we put letters into the bill based upon the amount of money the law 
said we should spend.
  The last time the Senate passed this bill, the Energy and Water 
appropriations bill, under regular order was 2009. I look forward to a 
regular appropriations process.
  At this time, I will briefly highlight a few parts of the bill. No. 1 
is waterways infrastructure. The bill restores $1.4 billion that the 
President proposed to cut from the Corps of Engineers. It sets a new 
record level of funding for the Corps in a regular appropriations bill. 
Many Senators have urged us to do this. There is not a funding line in 
the bill that has more support than the Army Corps of Engineers. The 
Corps rebuilds locks and dams, dredges our rivers and harbors, works to 
prevent floods and storm damage, and builds environmental restoration 
projects. If we had simply approved the President's request, the Corps 
would have received less than what Congress appropriated in 2006, 
setting us back more than a decade.
  In Tennessee, we provided enough funding to continue building a new 
Chickamauga Lock in fiscal year 2017. Up to $37 million will be 
available to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to continue work on the 
Chickamauga Lock. Only last month the Corps reiterated its most recent 
study that the Chickamauga Lock continues to be the fourth highest 
priority of essential American waterways to be rebuilt.
  We included $1.3 billion for the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. This 
is the third consecutive year we funded the Harbor Maintenance Trust 
Fund consistent with the funding level that Congress recommended in the 
Water Resources Development Act. This will permit us to deepen harbors, 
including Gulfport, Charleston, Mobile, Texas, Louisiana, Anchorage, 
Savannah, and harbors on the west coast.

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  Doubling basic energy research is a goal I have long supported and is 
one of the most important things we can do to unleash our free 
enterprise system.
  Senator Durbin and I worked together on an amendment to the Energy 
bill that increases the authorized funding levels for the Office of 
Science by about 7 percent per year, which would double the budget of 
the Office of Science from a little over $5 billion today to more than 
$10 billion in 10 years. That is basically the money that the U.S. 
Government spends on energy research. The Senate adopted our amendment 
by a voice vote, which demonstrates how much support there is for this 
goal. The President proposed to spend even more on energy research, 
including the Mission Innovation proposal, the pledge launched by the 
United States and 19 other countries at the climate summit in Paris, to 
double Federal clean energy research over the next 5 years. The problem 
is that President Obama's budget request proposed $2.259 billion in new 
mandatory funding for the Department of Energy. However, his commitment 
to doubling Federal clean energy research with mandatory funding comes 
at the expense of other resources and other agencies, which is at best 
unhelpful and at worse misleading. It is wishful thinking, and everyone 
knows it is not going to happen. Instead, we focused on priorities for 
discretionary funding annually approved by Congress. That is the bottom 
line that is under control, and it is not the source of our Federal 
debt problems.
  Our top priority was the Office of Science, which includes $5.4 
billion to support basic energy research--$50 million more than last 
year. This is the second year we have been able to increase funding for 
the Office of Science, which sets a new record level for funding for 
that office in a regular appropriations bill. This puts us one step 
closer to doubling funding for Federal basic energy research.
  The bill includes $292.7 million for ARPA-E, an agency that invests 
in high-impact energy technologies. The funding is a little more than 
last year's $1.7 million. The bill also supports the Department of 
Energy's continued efforts to advance exascale computing and includes a 
total of $285 million to produce these next-generation computers.
  Nuclear power provides about 20 percent of our country's electricity 
and 60 percent of our carbon-free electricity. If we are going to have 
the abundance of clean, cheap, reliable energy that we want and need, 
we need to unleash nuclear power by removing obstacles in its way.
  Our legislation sends a strong signal about our support for new 
technologies in the next generation of nuclear powerplants. We included 
$94.5 million for advanced reactors, $21 million more than the 
President's budget request. We included $95 million for small modular 
reactors, $32.5 million over last year.
  One way our bill helps is by taking important steps towards solving 
our country's stalemate over what to do with nuclear waste--a 
bipartisan issue and a goal that Senator Feinstein and I agree on and 
have been working hard to accomplish. Our legislation, therefore, 
includes a pilot program, which was Senator Feinstein's suggestion 3 
years ago, for consolidated nuclear waste storage. She and I introduced 
that over the past 4 years. The new sites we are seeking to establish 
will not take the place of Yucca Mountain--we have more than enough 
useful fuel to fill Yucca Mountain to its legal capacity--but it would 
rather complement it. We also provide funding for the U.S. Department 
of Energy to store nuclear waste at private facilities approved by the 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, such as the one proposed in West Texas.
  We are also supporting research in this bill that will help continue 
the work that is necessary to safely extend nuclear power operating 
licenses from 60 to 80 years. In my view, that is the simplest, easiest 
way to have a large amount of new carbon-free electricity in the near 
term.
  Finally, this legislation provides a total of $12.9 billion for the 
National Nuclear Security Administration and fully funds the warhead 
life extension programs recommended by the Nuclear Weapons Council in 
the design of the Ohio-class replacement submarine. It also supports 
crucial weapons facilities related to our national security.
  The bill provides $575 million for the Uranium Processing Facility in 
Oak Ridge, TN. It keeps the project on track to be completed by 2025, 
at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion.
  The legislation also advances our efforts to clean up hazardous 
materials at Cold War sites. A total of $5.4 billion is provided to 
support cleanup efforts, which is $144 million above the President's 
budget request.
  This bill adequately funds our Nation's energy and water priorities 
and fully complies with the spending limits established by the Budget 
Control Act. The Budget Control Act continues a line of spending for 
the appropriated dollars, which is the bottom line on the chart. The 
blue line on the chart, which has been flat since 2008 and only grows 
with the rate of inflation for the next 10 years according to the 
Congressional Budget Office, is not the source of the Federal debt 
problem. The rest of the line spends three times as much as the amount 
of money we are spending in the 12 appropriation bills we will be 
addressing for the next 2 weeks.
  I thank Senator Feinstein for her leadership and cooperation. I urge 
Senators to support the bill. We are already working on amendments with 
Senators that they seek to offer. We hope to begin voting on some this 
afternoon in an open amendment process and thereby proving that the 
appropriations process works.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). The Senator from California.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise today to speak in support of 
the fiscal year 2017 Energy and Water Development appropriations bill.
  I wish to begin by thanking my friend and colleague, Senator 
Alexander. We have served together as chairman or ranking member of 
this subcommittee for the past 5 years. I know of no one in this body 
who is more intelligent or has a greater sense of fairness. I just want 
Senator Alexander to know what a great treat it has been to work with 
him for 5 years. I think we have a bill that will stand the test of 
time. Each of us has had different views on different parts of the 
bill, but that is part of what makes this a great country.
  I say to Senator Alexander, I just want to thank you for being who 
you are and thank you for being the kind of U.S. Senator you are. Thank 
you very much.
  As the chairman mentioned, this bill has reached the floor for the 
first time since 2009. It is also being considered as an appropriations 
bill on the floor with the quickest time since the budgeting process 
began in 1974. I just want to say thank you to our leadership on both 
sides for the desire to get us back to regular order and particularly 
on appropriations bills.

  I wish to thank all of my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee 
for supporting this bill during last week's markup. As the chairman 
said, the vote was 30 to nothing, and that is a pretty good vote, so I 
thank my colleagues very much.
  I believe this is a good bill. It is a fair bill. It does contain 
trade-offs and hard choices, and we have worked together to settle 
differences. Obviously, the chair is the chair and those views come No. 
1, but in the case of this chair, he has been eminently fair and I am 
very grateful for that.
  As he said, our allocation is $37.5 billion. That is a $350 million 
increase over fiscal year 2016, and given the top line budget 
constraints, this is a good allocation.
  Let me first speak about the defense portion of the bill. Defense 
spending in this bill is $20 billion, a $450 million increase over 
fiscal year 2016. Our defense spending includes funding for cleaning up 
the environmental legacy of the cold war, maintaining our nuclear 
deterrent, supporting our nuclear Navy, and partnering with allies to 
keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists.
  Funding for our nuclear deterrent this year is $9.3 billion, $438 
million above last year and equal to the President's budget request.
  The science and engineering activities needed to maintain the nuclear 
stockpile without explosive testing are fully funded at $1.8 billion. 
The life extension programs for our nuclear warheads are also fully 
funded, including for the new cruise missile warhead, which I will 
speak to a little bit more in a moment.

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  I wish to take a moment now, though, to discuss my concerns with the 
long-range standoff weapon, or the LRSO. I believe the Defense 
Department is wrong when it argues that this isn't a new nuclear 
weapon. I think it is, and it carries with it powerful ramifications. 
The LRSO would carry an upgraded W80 warhead capable of immense 
destruction, and it would be fitted on to a new missile specifically 
designed to defeat the world's most advanced missile defense systems.
  I firmly believe that the LRSO is unnecessary. The United States has 
already developed and fielded a conventional cruise missile 
specifically designed to do the same job as the LRSO. Furthermore, the 
United States has a variety of nuclear ballistic missiles that can 
reach any target anywhere in the world.
  Why do I feel so strongly about this? It is very personal with me. I 
am one of the few who have seen this. I was 12 years old when the 
United States of America--my country--dropped nuclear weapons on 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the hundreds of thousands of bodies were 
seared with burns as the radiation spread, I have never quite gotten 
over what happened. I have reached the concept that nuclear weapons are 
really bad for this world. I will not go into it. When we see countries 
like North Korea practicing tests and other countries struggling to get 
a nuclear weapon and the high likelihood of terrorists also seeking out 
radioactive materials, I am very concerned about the probable use of 
this missile.
  In a letter sent 2 years ago, Under Secretary of Defense Frank 
Kendall wrote the following: ``Beyond deterrence, an LRSO-armed bomber 
force provides the President with uniquely flexible options in an 
extreme crisis.''
  This suggestion--that nuclear weapons should be a ``flexible'' 
option--is alarming. We should never lower the threshold for using 
nuclear weapons. In fact, I believe we can further reduce the role of 
nuclear weapons while still maintaining their deterrent effect by 
terminating the LRSO and instead relying on conventional nonnuclear 
weapons.
  Obviously, this is a point of disagreement between the two of us. 
This is why I am very thankful to the chairman. He has agreed to 
include language in the committee report requiring Energy Secretary 
Moniz and the Nuclear Weapons Council to provide more information on 
this warhead, including its military justification and the extent to 
which conventional weapons systems can meet the same objectives. I 
think we should have that material.
  I am also grateful to Senator Alexander for his commitment to hold a 
subcommittee hearing on the new nuclear cruise missile. I believe this 
issue hasn't received the attention it deserves, and it requires some 
public discussion. So I want to say thank you to him. I have yielded to 
his point of view and exchange. I actually am happy with the report 
language and the hearing. So I thank the chairman very much.
  Going back to the nonproliferation account, it is funded at the 
President's requested level of $1.8 billion. But this is a $120 million 
decrease from last year, and I hope we can do better next year.
  Work with Russia on securing material and facilities in that country 
has slowed, but other threats remain at home and abroad, and I believe 
we should be investing more.

  Funding for the environmental cleanup of legacy cold war sites is the 
highest it has been in many years--and that is very good--at $5.4 
billion, which is a $126 million increase above last year. This 
reflects the importance this subcommittee has placed on addressing 
environmental contamination at sites in Washington, New Mexico, South 
Carolina, and Tennessee. I thank the chairman for what he said about 
putting a pilot nuclear waste facility reference in our bill. Nuclear 
waste is piling up all over this country, with no good place for it to 
go. I can reference my State alone.
  Southern California Edison, a huge utility serving over 16 million 
people, has had two big nuclear reactors, each one 1,100 megawatts. 
They are now in the process of decommissioning those reactors. This 
facility sits in the heart of an urban area, and there are now 3,300 
hot plutonium rods in spent fuel pools at that facility site. We need a 
place for nuclear waste in this country because it is very dangerous to 
have it spread all over and to have decommissioned reactors with hot 
plutonium waste in spent fuel pools right on the coast of the Pacific 
Rim where we see earthquakes happening, not the least of which was in 
Ecuador and a recent quake in Japan.
  Now let me turn to the nondefense half of the bill. Our nondefense 
allocation this year is $17.5 billion, and that is roughly a $100 
million decrease from fiscal year 2016. One of the anomalies of this 
portfolio is the fact that as defense goes up, it crowds out the 
nondefense--important things like the Army Corps of Engineers, 
important things like the Office of Science. So our nondefense 
allocation is at $17.5 billion.
  Despite this, the bill maintains funding levels for basic scientific 
research, energy technology development, and water infrastructure. 
Funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science sees a modest 
increase of $50 million to $5.4 billion this year.
  The Office of Science is the largest single funder of physical 
science research in the United States--think of that--and supports 
research at 300 universities in all 50 States. Its experimental 
facilities host more than 24,000 researchers each year.
  Funding for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is 
$2.1 billion, equal to fiscal year 2016, and that program funds 
activities to develop the technology that makes our homes, cars, and 
factories more efficient. It lowers the cost of renewable energy 
sources like solar and geothermal.
  While I wish we could have funded the President's proposed mark for 
Mission Innovation climate change, I want my colleagues to know that we 
did the best we could, but we were simply unable to make it work with 
the allocation we received.
  The chairman mentioned the Army Corps of Engineers. With the highway 
program and the Army Corps, this is really the Federal infrastructure 
program, and it is funded at $6 billion. This is a historic high. It 
maintains level funding for the Bureau of Reclamation at $1.275 
billion. In particular, the bill provides an estimated $1.3 billion 
from the harbor maintenance trust fund. That is the highest level ever.
  While users of our Nation's harbors and ports pay into the fund, the 
money does not get disbursed by itself, and it is up to us to 
appropriate the money out of the fund. This has been a challenge under 
current budget caps, and it has been a challenge to me because my 
State--California--pays approximately 40 percent of the fund's receipts 
each year but gets shortchanged by the disbursement formula. So I am 
very pleased that the chairman and the members have agreed to provide 
an additional $50 million for energy ports and donor ports like L.A.-
Long Beach and Seattle-Tacoma that otherwise see little benefit from 
the harbor maintenance trust fund.
  The bill, once again, includes $100 million for the Bureau of 
Reclamation's Western Drought Response program. Ten of the 17 
reclamation States are currently suffering from severe to exceptional 
drought conditions that have devastated the agricultural industry, left 
some rural communities without any water for drinking or bathing, and 
killed tens of millions of trees that could lead to yet another 
catastrophic wildfire season in these 10 States. We in California had 
hoped that El Nino storms would refill California reservoirs, but the 
drought persists and will persist. It is estimated that we need a 
snowpack, just for point of interest, of 150 percent of the average by 
April 1 in order to end the drought, and the snowpack was only 87 
percent of the historical average. Therefore, this $100 million is 
critical to operating water systems more flexibly and efficiently, 
restoring critical wetlands and habitat, and ensuring that the best 
science and observational techniques are being brought to bear.
  The bill also makes critical investments in new water supply 
technologies to help mitigate the current drought and lessen the 
impacts of future droughts such as desalinization, water recycling, and 
groundwater recharge.
  As Members begin to bring amendments to the floor, I very much urge 
my colleagues, particularly on this

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side, to exercise restraint, particularly with policy amendments. The 
Senate has just completed a broad energy authorization bill, and I 
understand that the Environmental and Public Works Committee will soon 
be drafting a Water Resources Development Act. So I want my colleagues 
to know that the subcommittee has had to make some tough choices, but 
these decisions were made in a bipartisan way and have led us to draft 
a balanced bill, one that I believe and hope should satisfy Members on 
both sides of the aisle.
  I thank the chairman and the Presiding Officer, and I yield the 
floor.

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