FY 2010 budget cuts Yucca, oil and gas programs

by Carolyn Gramling
Thursday, January 5, 2012

Blogging on EARTH

The White House Office of Management and Budget released today its FY 2010 budget reductions and savings — what programs it plans to cut or reduce.

The OMB reiterates the President's focus on education, health care and alternative sources of energy in the overall budget, while slipping in some interesting cuts. Many programs were cut outright: In particular, the White House proposes to eliminate the controversial Yucca Mountain Repository Program — the Nevada site of a long-proposed national repository for high-level nuclear waste (the budget does give the Department of Energy $197 million in 2010 to look for alternative waste disposal sites).

And $5 million in programs supporting oil and gas research have been cut, including subsidies to oil and gas companies, and both mandatory (via provisions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act) and discretionary funding for the development of oil and gas research-related technologies — which the budget states should in future be paid for by the companies that benefit from them.

For the full list of reductions, terminations and savings, go here.


© 2008-2021. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the expressed written permission of the American Geosciences Institute is expressly prohibited. Click here for all copyright requests.