Congress annually considers eleven or more appropriations measures, which provide funding for numerous activities, for example, national defense, education, homeland security, and crime. These measures also fund general government operations such as the administration of federal agencies. Congress has developed certain rules and practices for the consideration of appropriations measures, referred to as the congressional appropriations process.

Appropriations measures are under the jurisdiction of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. These committees control only about 40% of total federal spending provided for a fiscal year. The House and Senate legislative committees control the rest.

There are three types of appropriations measures. Regular appropriations bills provide most of the funding that is provided in all appropriations measures for a fiscal year, and must be enacted by October 1 of each year. If regular bills are not enacted by the deadline, Congress adopts continuing resolutions to continue funding until regular bills are enacted. Supplemental bills are considered later and provide additional appropriations.

DOE initiated the Clean Coal Technology program in 1985. It is a government and industry co-funded effort to provide technical and operational data of innovative coal technologies demonstrated at commercial scale. This program has evolved into the Clean Coal Power Initiative, the Department’s current coal technology demonstration program. The Department also administers a clean coal research program which researches and develops high risk, bench scale coal technologies. The goal of the program is to develop advanced coal technologies that will allow our country to continue to use our lowest cost, and abundant, domestic natural resource, coal. The technologies developed in the program have dramatically reduced pollutant emissions from coal-fueled electricity generation plants, and are technologies are being developed to help reduce carbon emissions to achieve near-zero atmospheric emissions power production.

The coal programs administered by the Department of Energy are funded through the Energy & Water Appropriations bills that are enacted by Congress. CURC^SM advocates for the coal programs on an annual basis before Congress and the Administration.

Please click here for information on the FY 2007 and FY 2008 Energy & Water Appropriations bills.

Information from "The Congressional Appropriations Process: An Introduction" updated September 8, 2006 by Sandy Streeter, Analyst in American National Government, Government and Finance Division, and from the Department of Energy.