The Senate late Wednesday confirmed Marvin Adams to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration’s office of defense programs, clearing the way for the Texas A&M professor and longtime weapons-labs consultant to enter federal service for the first time.
Adams had a whirlwind trip through the Senate, where lawmakers confirmed him Wednesday after the body’s Armed Services Committee gave him a unanimously favorable recommendation on Tuesday. The committee held his confirmation hearing on March 22, about three months after the White House announced President Joe Biden’s intention to nominate Adams for one of D.C.’s top civilian nuclear-weapons jobs.
Adams had a mostly cordial confirmation hearing, during which he pledged support for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan to build two new plutonium pit factories — one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and another at the Savannah River Site.
Adams also told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that he would review the NNSA’s pit strategy, which has fallen about five years behind schedule because the NNSA no longer things it can built a pit factory at the Savannah River Site by 2030, as the agency once said it would try to do.
While the planned Savannah River facility is years behind schedule, in the NNSA’s estimation, the agency believes it can still start making multiple war-usable pits — the fissile triggers of the primary stages of modern thermonuclear weapons — at Los Alamos by 2026.
Warren, an anti-corruption firebrand on constant vigil for perceived waste in defense spending, said during Adams’ confirmation hearing that “sticking to the current plan [on pits] just defies common sense” and that the NNSA has in her view a “record of waste and mismanagement.” She asked Adams to commit to reviewing the agency’s pit program, with an eye toward getting it on a more “sustainable and achievable path.”
Adams told Warren that, if confirmed, that he would review the program — but he also said he supported the NNSA’s plan to build pits in New Mexico and South Carolina and that he believed “firmly” that the two planned factories would one day be capable of casting at least 80 pits annually, as the military requires.
Federal law mandates that the NNSA make at least 80 pits a year by 2030, but the NNSA last year said the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility will not be built until 2035 or so. The agency — as federal law also requires — formally notified congressional Armed Services Committees late last year that it would blow the deadline, a Republican spokesperson for the Senate Armed Services Committee told the Exchange Monitor this week.
However, the NNSA had not as of Monday transmitted to Congress a legally required plan for getting the pit program back on track, the Armed Services minority spokesperson said.
“We expect the NWC [Nuclear Weapons Council] to comply with the requirement to provide Congress with a plan for reaching the plutonium milestones enshrined in statute, and allow Congress to determine whether it will provide the necessary resources – as is the intent of the law.
Adams will replace Charles Verdon as NNSA’s deputy director for defense programs. Verdon has served in the position since 2018 and, after inauguration day in 2021, did a brief stint as the acting administrator for the entire NNSA.
