Washington – The Senate voted Monday to cut significantly the budget for the troubled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump as negotiators tried to finalize several spending bills before stopgap funding expires.
The $450 million Yucca Mountain budget – down $127 million from each of the last two years – is included in a final bill funding energy and water programs for fiscal 2006, which cleared the Senate by an 84-4 vote. Senate negotiators immediately headed to a House meeting room for talks on two other bills.
The urgency comes as lawmakers try to wrap up work on the 11 spending bills that make up the approximately one-third of the federal budget that Congress passes each year. After years of consistent increases, the overall budget for domestic agencies, except for the Homeland Security Department, is essentially frozen or even slightly below last year’s levels.
The Senate vote clears the sixth of 11 spending bills for President Bush’s signature. Lawmakers hope to be done by Friday, when a stopgap bill expires.
Meanwhile, House leaders have had trouble passing $50 billion-plus in cuts over five years to the approximately 55 percent of the budget for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid that goes up automatically each year. GOP leaders scrapped plans for a vote last week.
