The Office of Management and Budget has issued a new memo that would direct federal agencies to ensure that their discretionary budget requests for fiscal 2019 are in agreement with the White House’s fiscal 2018 spending measure, Government Executive reported Wednesday.

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney wrote in a memo released Friday that agencies should determine additional investments in programs that seek to meet a federal role and support their mission and submit their FY 2019 discretionary budget requests by Sept. 11.

“These investments should reflect no more than a 5 percent increase above your submission level,” he noted.

Agencies should exclude from their proposals shifts of activities or costs to other parts of their budgets, cuts to mandatory spending and enactment of new user fees.

Mulvaney advised agencies to include in their budget requests workforce and reform plans that seek to include proposals across four categories such as elimination of activities, mergers or restructuring and workforce management.

He also noted that OMB plans to work with agencies in the next few months to evaluate and refine the mandatory budget proposals.

“Any new mandatory proposals should be at least budget neutral, or should be accompanied by new mandatory offsets that fully cover the costs of the new proposals,” Mulvaney added.

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.