The House Appropriations Committee’s proposed fiscal year 2018 budget for the Department of Homeland Security includes $44.3 billion in discretionary funds — an increase of $1.9 billion from the FY 2017 enacted level.

The committee said Tuesday the legislation includes $1.6 billion for the construction of a wall along the U.S. southern border as well as $6.8 billion for disaster relief and emergency response efforts.

Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) said the bill would provide funds to start building the border wall, update existing border security infrastructure, recruit more border patrol agents and support detention operations.

The bill would also designate $13.8 billion for the Customs and Border Protection, $7 billion for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $10.5 billion for the U.S. Coast Guard, $7.2 billion for the Transportation Security Administration and $2 billion for the U.S. Secret Service.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will receive $7.3 billion for its disaster relief account and the National Protection and Programs Directorate will get $1.8 billion for cybersecurity initiatives.

President Donald Trump intends to nominate Paul Dabbar, managing director of the global mergers and acquisitions group at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., as undersecretary for science at the Energy Department.

Dabbar has experience in managing investments within energy industry segments such distributed-generation, geothermal, LNG, oil and gas, pipeline, solar, trading and wind energy, the White House said Tuesday.

He currently serves as a member of the DOE’s Environmental Management Advisory Board as well as a lecturer at the Naval Academy Economics Department.

The investment veteran helped managed more than $400 billion in transactions as a financial adviser on corporate mergers and restructurings, government privatizations, joint ventures, private equity transactions, subsidiary sales and purchases.

Dabbar also served as a nuclear submarine officer on board the U.S.S. Pintado in Mare Island, California, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Previously, he conducted research efforts for the Defense Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

The House Appropriations Committee’s transportation, housing and urban development bill would allocate $21.6 million in fiscal 2018 funds to the Federal Aviation Administration’s commercial space transportation office, Space News reported Tuesday.

The proposed budget in the draft appropriations bill reflects a $1.7 million increase from AST’s funds under the omnibus spending measure for fiscal 2017.

AST oversees the licensing process for commercial space launches and re-entries and issues permits for flight tests of reusable suborbital vehicles.

The office has licensed 15 launches since October 2016 and those include 10 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches and three United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V missions.

The House’s appropriations subpanel was scheduled to mark up the bill Tuesday, the report added.

NASA plans to present a Mars robotic exploration architecture at a National Academies panel meeting to be held in late August, Space News reported Monday.

Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, said the new Mars architecture will support sample return missions and that he is working to get “agency endorsement” of the proposed architecture before the August presentation.

The August meeting seeks to evaluate NASA’s efforts to implement the 2011 planetary science decadal survey.

“We’re on the hook to present something because this is actually something that Congress has asked for in their appropriations,” he said during a teleconference meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group Monday.

NASA’s budget request for fiscal 2018 allocated $2.9 million in funds for future exploration missions to Mars such as follow-on Mars 2020 rover missions and development plans for a new orbiter, the report added.

The General Services Administration will notify industry on Tuesday regarding its decision to call off the agency’s search for a new FBI headquarters, the Washington Post reported Monday.

The cancellation came four months after GSA postponed the announcement of its selected site for the new FBI building until it secures congressional funds and less than a month after House appropriators revoked the proposed $200 million in funds for the project.

Some government officials said the lack of permanent administrators at GSA and FBI could have thwarted efforts to secure funds for the new headquarters, the report noted.

FBI and GSA considered Springfield, Virginia, as well as Landover and Greenbelt in Maryland as candidate sites for the bureau’s new facility.