FY2000 Defense Cleanup funding

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Congress has not completed Conference action on the Fiscal Year 2000
Defense Appropriations bill, so the combined Environmental Restoration
budget (covering active and former bases) will be somewhere between the
$1.27 billion approved by the House and the $1.3 billion approved by the
Senate. The adminstration requested $1.26 billion and the Authorization
legislation approved $1.3 billion.

The  Fiscal Year 2000 Military Construction Appropriations bill is ready
for the President's signature. (I haven't seen a report that he has
signed it.) The amount for base closure cleanup is only $346.4 million,
but it's unclear what that will mean. Congress reportedly rejected the
Defense Department's new bookkeeping plan to approve projects without
obligating funds, but I don't know how much that will delay projects in
the field. In theory, the substantial reduction in base closure cleanup
funding could stall many projects and increase the armed services
resistance to setting protective cleanup standards.

The Congressional Research Service summarized the status of the the base
closure environmental money in its August 16, 1999 update, "Defense
Cleanup and Environmental Programs: Authorization and Appropriations for
FY2000," by David M. Bearden, excerpted below. The full report is
available at http://www.cnie.org/nle/pub-2.html.

"Military Construction. The Senate passed the FY2000 appropriations bill
for military construction (S. 1205) on June 16, 1999, and the House
passed its version of the bill (H.R. 2465) on July 13, 1999. A
conference committee on the two bills filed its report (H.Rept. 106-266)
on July 27, 1999. The House passed the conference report on July 29,
1999, and the Senate passed the measure on August 3, 1999, clearing the
bill for the President's signature. The conference agreement would
reserve $346.4 million for environmental cleanup at military bases
designated for closure, about $13.7 million less than the House's
proposal and the Administration's request of $360.1 million, and nearly
$80 million less than the Senate's amount of $426.0 million. While the
conference amount of $346.4 million and the Administration's request of
$360.1 million would be a substantial decrease from the level of nearly
$698 million enacted for FY1999, DOD is actually estimating an increase
in the cleanup program level to a total of $814 million in FY2000. ...
the lower level of funding requested for FY2000 reflects the amount that
DOD expects to obligate during the fiscal year to begin approved
remediation projects, whereas the higher program level reflects the full
costs of projects to be approved in FY2000 but not begun until FY2001."

Lenny Siegel
  
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Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 222B View St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/968-1126
lsiegel@cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org