The House on a party-line vote on July 18 adopted the Senate-passed version of roughly $9 billion in fiscal year 2025 spending rescissions requested by President Trump in June.
The measure now heads to the White House for the President’s expected signature.
The vote came after the House Appropriations Committee on July 17 approved overall funding levels for all 12 FY 2026 appropriations bills. They had previously only agreed to allocations for five of the 12. Under yesterday’s allocations, defense spending would remain level relative to fiscal year (FY) 2025, but non-defense spending would be cut by $45 billion (or about 6 percent).
That includes an overall allocation of $57.3 billion for the Energy and Water Development Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026, which also was approved by the committee yesterday. The bill passed on a party-line vote and would provide $24.1 billion for nondefense energy programs, a cut of over $675 million, or 2.7 percent, below the fiscal year 2025 enacted level. A summary of nondefense spending in the bill is provided in the table below.
Committee Directs DOE to Work with Industry to Survey Grid Operators on Interconnection Applications
In addition, in the report accompanying the bill, the committee directs the Department of Energy to work with industry to survey electric transmission and distribution system operators for data on new generator interconnection applications and to provide a report to the committee by next year.
In report language the committee wrote, "The Committee recognizes the dramatic load growth on the electric grid over the next decade, in part due to the commercial computation sector. As such, the EIA is encouraged to collect data on aggregate state-level, monthly computation sector electricity demand. The EIA is encouraged to publish this data alongside its other data on electricity consumption by customer segment (residential, commercial, industrial) monthly, at state-level granularity."
The committee also noted the unique challenges facing the distribution transformer supply chain and that a stable supply of distribution transformers is critical to preserving the reliability of the grid.
As a result, DOE is encouraged “to conduct activities that will expand domestic manufacturing capacity within the distribution transformer supply chain, including efforts to increase the energy efficiency of the manufacturing process.” The committee also directed DOE to “continue its efforts to engage with utilities, distribution transformer manufacturers, and other industry stakeholders in the supply chain to analyze and help identify potential solutions that can help ease the supply-demand mismatch.”
