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8.2 Current Treatment of the Nuclear Waste Fund in the Federal Budget 8.2.1 A Case of Unintended Consequences and Constraints The Fund has not worked as intended to insulate the nation’s civilian nuclear waste management program from the vagaries of the federal budget process while at the same time insulating the federal budget from the costs of the waste program. A series of actions by successive administrations and Congresses (see text box below) has made the approximately $750 million in annual fee revenues and the unspent $27 billion balance in the Fund effectively inaccessible to federal budgeters and appropriators, forcing them to take money away from other federal priorities to fund activities needed to meet contractual waste management obligations. As a result, waste management needs have had to compete with other priorities in DOE’s annual budget request and in the Congressional appropriations process (figure 17), subjecting the program to exactly the sort of “budgetary perturbations” that the funding mechanism was intended to avoid.
Senator Bennett Johnston, then Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, pointed out the problem in 1994:183 “We thought we had provided a guaranteed funding source for the waste program when we created the Nuclear Waste Fund in 1982. The Waste Fund consists of money paid by electric ratepayers for the sole purpose of funding this program...Unfortunately, the Waste Fund has become entangled in budget rules adopted in recent years to combat the deficit. The unintended consequence of these rules had been to put most of the Nuclear Waste Fund out of reach of the very program for which the money is being collected.” In other words, a program that was intended to be fully self-financing now has to compete for limited discretionary funding in the annual appropriations process, while the contractual user fees intended to prevent this from happening are treated just like tax revenues and used to reduce the apparent deficit on the mandatory side of the federal budget (which deals with expenditures and receipts that are not subject to annual appropriations).
Figure 17. Nuclear Waste Program: Budget Requests versus Appropriations 184 1,000 Budget request Appropriations
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