The Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a bill that would authorize $515.9 billion for the Defense Department‘s base expenditures and another $58.6 billion wartime overseas contingency programs in fiscal 2017, Defense News reported Thursday.

Joe Gould writes defense authorization bill, which the committee unanimously approved Thursday, will now go to the full Senate for consideration.

“The bill sustains a strong US force structure, and it makes significant investments in readiness, shipbuilding programs, aircraft procurement and missile defense,” Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), was quoted as saying.

The report said the panel’s proposed DoD budget for the next fiscal year is $1.7 billion less than President Barack Obama’s request.

Senate appropriators rejected the House’s proposal to move a portion of war funds to the base defense budget and added 8 amendments to the funding bill.

Gould noted one amendment calls for the department to expedited efforts to replace its fleet of UH-1N military helicopters and another amendment seeks to elevate the status of the U.S. Cyber Command to a combatant command.

The spending bill would allow DoD to reallocate about $15.1 billion in department funds to procure items on the “unfunded priorities” list of the four service branches, according to the report.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has led a public-private team to develop an international standard that aims to provide manufacturers with a systematic method on how to outline the environmental aspects of any production process.

NIST said Thursday the ASTM International E3012-16 standard seeks to help manufacturing firms achieve their sustainability goals through the adoption of a science-based approach.

The approach aims to guide firms on how to collect and define data about a production process’ environmental impacts as well as support them in their decision-making processes, the agency added.

“We designed ASTM E3012-16 to let manufacturers virtually characterize their production processes as computer models, and then, using a standardized method, ‘plug and play’ the environmental data for each process step to visualize impacts and identify areas for improving overall sustainability of the system,” said Kevin Lyons, NIST systems engineer and chair of the ASTM committee that created the standard.

According to NIST, members of the ASTM committee plan to incorporate into the standard several key performance indicators of sustainable manufacturing.

“In the long term, we’d also like to establish a repository of process models and case studies from different manufacturing sectors so that users of the standard can compare and contrast against their production methods,” Lyons added.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation Council seeks public comment on a proposed rule that calls for information on the public disclosure of government contractors’ greenhouse gas emissions and reduction strategies.

Anne Rung, Ali Zaidi and Christine Harada wrote in a blog post published Wednesday that the proposed rule will focus on the federal government’s supply chain management and work to collect data necessary to assess suppliers’ greenhouse gas management practices and engage with them to reduce emissions.

The Defense Department, General Services Administration and NASA have proposed this revision to FAR for vendors to indicate in a representation within the System for Award Management if and where they disclose greenhouse gas emissions and greenhouse gas reduction goals, a notice published Wednesday on the Federal Register stated.

Comments to the proposed rule are due July 25.

The White House report noted individual federal agencies — including GSA and the U.S. Navy — have started to manage supply chains through a process similar to the proposal.