FPN19-11

President Submits FY 2020 Budget Request to Congress

March 23, 2019

President Trump has submitted his Fiscal Year 2020 budget request to Congress. The submittal includes his budget requests for the US Department of Energy, its Office of Science (including the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (including Inertial Confinement Fusion and NNSA Science). FY 2020 begins on October 1, 2019. The Department of Energy Budget documents can be found at http://www.energy.gov/budget.

The President request $31.7B compared to the FY 2019 appropriation of $35.5B. For the Office of Science, he requests $5.5B compared to $6.6B in FY 2019. For the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, he requests $403M compared to $564M in FY 2019. He proposes to eliminate the ARPA-E program entirely. ARPA-E received $366M in FY 2019 (which included some small activities in fusion energy).

For NNSA, he requests $16.5B compared to $15.2B in FY 2019. For Inertial Confinement Fusion, he requests $480.6M compared to $545M in FY 2019. For NNSA Science (which includes an unspecified amount for high energy density physics) he requests $586.6M compared to $480.4M in FY 2019.

Within the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences $403M FY 2020 request the President proposes $107M for the US contribution to the international ITER project and $296M for the US domestic fusion program compared to $132M and $432M respectively appropriated in FY 2019. The resulting $136M proposed reduction in the US domestic fusion program is spread approximately proportionately among all elements of the US domestic fusion program (-$137M) with the exception of a +$1M proposed increase for a construction upgrade for the fusion project at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.