Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, in a letter to the White House, is urging the President to personally intervene in an effort to stop an Office of Management and Budget plan to gut the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Program in its Fiscal Year 2011 budget – with the States of Tennessee and Idaho taking the biggest hit. The Environmental Management Program funds environmental remediation efforts at nuclear energy sites like the Idaho National Laboratory. Simpson was joined on the letter by Tennessee Congressman Zach Wamp. Both are members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development which funds all of the Department of Energy’s many functions.

In their letter to President Obama, Simpson and Wamp expressed their concern with the actions of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in seeking up to fifty percent reductions for cleanup activities in Idaho and Tennessee.

“We write today to respectfully request your assistance in preventing an attempt by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to dramatically curtail funding for the federal government’s nuclear environmental remediation efforts in our state,” the two Congressmen wrote. “Such cuts would have a devastating impact on the ability of the DOE to meet its legal and contractual obligations to our states.  Further, such reductions to cleanup funding would represent a fundamental betrayal of the trust the people of Tennessee and Idaho have placed in the DOE.”

Simpson and Wamp outlined the successes of cleanup efforts across the country and said that progress would be halted by these cuts. “We are proud to report that the DOE is making great strides in meeting its cleanup obligations in Tennessee and Idaho where amazing work is being accomplished on limited budgets. These accomplishments would not be possible but for the stable budgets we and many of our colleagues have been working toward for many years,” wrote Simpson and Wamp. “The reductions planned in your budget would undo decades of hard work to ensure adequate funding for the EM program and put an immediate halt to the tremendous progress being made on the ground all across the country – but most prominently in Tennessee and Idaho.”

“As you know, the work to date is just a portion of the long-term work that will be required to meet the DOE’s environmental cleanup obligations. Much more work is yet to be done. The longer you delay that work, the more money taxpayers will ultimately spend meeting the unquestionable obligation of the federal government to cleanup these sites,” the two Congressmen concluded.

A complete copy of Simpson’s letter is attached.