Congresswoman Lee Applauds the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill Passed out of Committee
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In response to the FY2020 Energy and Water Appropriations bill, which passed committee on Tuesday, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) issued the following statement:
“As a member of the House Appropriations, I am pleased to see an Energy and Water bill that will ensure that America continues to build its energy infrastructure and that we protect our bodies of water for future generations. The bill is funded at $46.4 billion, an increase of $1.8 billion from fiscal year 2019
“The FY2020 Energy and Water Appropriations bill includes - once again - my critical report language on workforce diversity in the Department of Energy. This language directs the Secretary of Energy to provide a detailed plan on the recruitment and retention at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (APISIs), Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs) and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). This language is vital to increasing and retaining workforce diversity in our nation’s laboratories and is long overdue from the Administration.
“This bill also allocates $600 thousand to build a K-12 pipeline for a diverse STEM workforce. This approach will allow the Department of Energy to use funds for outreach activities to add diversity to the applicant pool and target students that traditionally go underrepresented in STEM fields. With this money, we will train the next generation of STEM students and professionals in our national labs.
“I am also happy to see some critical report language on 10-20-30 formula that fights persistent and high poverty census tracts in this bill that will provide critical report language on the percentage of funding that directed to persistent poverty counties and high poverty areas over the last three fiscal years. Getting this information will help inform our committee which communities need additional targeted resources to help reduce poverty.
“This bill provides $2.14 billion for the Office of Sciences: Basic Energy Sciences program. As the nation’s primary sponsor of research in the physical sciences, this office is critical to funding my home Department of Energy (DOE) lab in Berkeley, California.
“Finally, There is also $425 million, an increase of $59 million to ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) program and the $2.65 billion to the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) account. Both programs are critical to renewable energy and science funding in my district.”
Other highlights of the bill include:
- Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund: $1.697 billion, $147 million more than FY2019
- Office of Science: Basic Energy Sciences Program: $2.143 billion, $23 million less than FY2019, due to completed construction plans.
- Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Building Technologies Office: $248 million, $22 million more than FY2019
- Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy: The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) helps fund innovative energy technologies and advances new techniques to generate, store, and use energy. $425 million, $59 million more than FY2019
- Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research - National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). NERSC is the DOE Office of Science’s major scientific computing resource with 6,000 users from throughout the nation who publish over 2,000 scientific papers annually – about five times more users than the Office of Science’s other high-performance computing facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories. To meet the needs of these users, and to ensure that we can move toward exascale capabilities, all of DOE’s HPC facilities must be upgraded and updated consistently to provide the needed power capacity and adequate infrastructure is available. $100 million, $15 million more than FY2019.
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