Cost-Share Accountability Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. OBERNOLTE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Lucas), my friend and colleague, for yielding time.

Research and development grants from the Department of Energy play a vital role in catalyzing the development of new energy technology in the United States. The awarding of those grants is governed by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Among other things, the act requires the DOE to impose a cost-sharing requirement on non-Federal applicants for those grants. This is very appropriate because it gives the grant applicants some skin in the game, some financial participation of their own.

These cost-sharing requirements can be as low as 20 percent with respect to research and development grants and as high as 50 percent for grants like commercialization or demonstration projects.

As the gentleman from Oklahoma said, the DOE is empowered to, in appropriate circumstances, waive those cost-sharing requirements.

Several months ago, the SST Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee had a hearing in which we examined some of the circumstances under which that discretion to waive or reduce cost-sharing had been applied by the DOE.

Now, to be clear, we actually concluded that the DOE had appropriately used its authority in these circumstances. However, we were very surprised by the lack of transparency in this process and how difficult it was to obtain the information about how often the DOE was using this authority and under what circumstances.

This bill is a very simple answer to that difficulty and a solution to this problem. H.R. 6933, the Cost-Share Accountability Act of 2022, will impose a reporting requirement on the DOE in which it will be required quarterly to make reports to both the relevant committees of jurisdiction in the House and the Senate on the number of occasions and the circumstances in which it wielded this authority to reduce or eliminate cost-shares in grants that it awards.

This will allow us here in Congress to better fulfill our oversight responsibilities toward the Department of Energy.

Also, and equally importantly, it will provide transparency to the applicants for these grants under what circumstances it is appropriate for the DOE to waive these cost-sharing requirements.

This is a basic good-governance bill, and I urge my colleagues to support it. I thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Foster), my friend and colleague, for being my bipartisan co-lead on this legislation.

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