Chattanooga-area Congress member Chuck Fleischmann to head energy funding panel

As Republicans gain majority control this month of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann has been appointed to head a congressional panel that oversees funding for the Department of Energy, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Fleischmann, a Chattanooga Republican and the only Tennessee member of Congress on the House Appropriations Committee, will be chairman of the Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee in the 118th Congress that convened in Washington earlier this month.

In his role as one of a dozen so-called “cardinals” in the U.S. House of Representatives, Fleischmann will lead the House panel that last year allocated a record $7.4 billion in federal funds for Oak Ridge Reservation, including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex and the East Tennessee Technology Park in the northern part of Fleischmann’s 3rd Congressional District in East Tennessee.

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“This is a critically important position for our great state and our nation,” Fleischmann said in a statement after Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger, R-Texas, announced the subcommittee assignments. “I am excited to find bipartisan common ground to advance important initiatives like modernizing our nation’s nuclear stockpile and advancing groundbreaking nuclear fusion research.”

Fleischmann is beginning his seventh term in Congress and previously served as the ranking member of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives in the previous Congress. The 60-year-old GOP lawmaker, a longtime supporter of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-California, sought to be chairman of the energy and water subcommittee, which provides most of the federal funding for projects in his congressional district.

“Congressman Fleischmann has worked diligently over the last four years to strengthen our homeland security, and as chairman of the Energy and Water Subcommittee, I know he will work to cut wasteful government spending and restore fiscal responsibility while meeting our military and energy security needs,” Granger said in her appointment Monday of Fleischmann and 11 other subcommittee chairs.

The bills passed by the Appropriations Committee regulate expenditures of money by the government of the United States, and the subcommittee chairs often exert considerable influence in crafting the budget plans for the federal agencies under their jurisdiction.

“This is a big deal for the 3rd Congressional District and for the state, and it is certainly good news for Oak Ridge,” Kent Syler, a professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Syler, who previously worked on Capitol Hill for former Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tennessee, said Congress “is certainly polarized today” and major legislation may be difficult to pass with the Senate controlled by Democrats and Republicans in the majority in the U.S. House. But the federal budget must be approved each…