President Clinton sent his Fiscal Year 2001 Budget to Congress on February 7. Contained therein is a request for $247.27 million for the DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (OFES). This compares to a level of $244.686 million for FY 2000 (Congress actually appropriated $250 million, but this was subsequently reduced by across-the-board spending cuts).

The OFES allocates these monies in three subcategories: Science, Facilities Operations, and Enabling R&D. The Science category is proposed to decrease from $138.489 million in FY 2000 to $136.202 in FY 2001; the Facilities Operations is proposed to increase from $71.545 million to $77.440 million; the Enabling R&D is proposed to decrease from $34.652 million to $33.628 million. The increase in Facilities Operations is due to a planned increase in the cost of Decommissioning the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor site at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Funds allocated for actual operations of the major tokamak facilities (DIII-D, Alcator C-Mod and NSTX) all decrease. There is a significant increase proposed for the Theory program: from $24.536 million to $27.536 million, and an increase for General Plasma Science, from $7.964 million to $8.45 million. All other subprograms show varying degrees of decrement.

The budget document is available at the DOE/OFES web site: http://wwwofe.er.doe.gov/ then click on "Program News," then click on FY 2001 budget (pdf format).