White House budgeteers want federal agencies to consider the costs of climate change when they submit their fiscal 2017 spending plans.

It's the first time the White House Office of Management and Budget has officially asked agencies to bake climate change costs into its projections. The directive applies to federal facilities, as the Obama administration said it wants buildings and other operations to be resilient to extreme weather, flooding and other events scientists have linked to a warming planet.

"We are making it very clear that this is a priority in proposals for capital funding. Why? Because making our Federal facility investments climate-smart reduces our fiscal exposure to the impacts of climate change. It's the right thing to do to run an efficient and effective government," Ali Zaidi, associate director for natural resources, energy and science at the Office of Management and Budget, said in a Wednesday blog post.

President Obama has used executive orders in the past to encourage agencies to consider the costs of a changing climate.

He issued a September 2013 executive order that directed agencies to "consider the need to improve climate adaptation and resilience, including the costs and benefits of such improvement ... such as updating agency policies for leasing, building upgrades, relocation of existing facilities and equipment, and construction of new facilities."

The reach of such a budget-making request is wide — Zaidi noted that the Defense Department manages over 560,000 facilities across the world and that the National Park Service estimated $40 billion of infrastructure and historical and cultural landmarks were at risk because of sea level rise.

But Republicans have disagreed with the cost at which the Obama administration associates with emitting greenhouse gases, which a consensus of scientists say are warming the planet.

Known as the "social cost of carbon," conservatives contend the White House is using too high a figure so as to artificially raise the costs of inaction on reducing emissions. House GOP budgets have attempted to restrict the policy by changing the social cost of carbon to consider only domestic effects of emissions rather than the contribution to overall global emissions.

The White House has defended its social cost of carbon figure, saying it represented updated science and that sequestering the cost of emissions to the United States flouts the concept of global warming.

"This revision would ignore the trans-boundary movement of carbon, fail to capture key costs of carbon emissions, and disrupt dozens of upcoming rules that would use the SCC to monetize carbon reduction benefits," the Office of Management and Budget said in a June 23 veto threat of the fiscal 2016 House Interior and Environment spending bill.