The Senate last week adopted language that would scale back, but not eliminate, some of the new oversight and influence the chamber’s Armed Services Committee proposed to give the Pentagon over civilian nuclear weapons budgets via the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
On July 2, the Senate unanimously adopted an amendment from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), which strikes provisions from the annual defense policy bill that would have required the secretary of defense, through the joint DOD-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council, to participate in the earliest stages of the annual budget negotiations for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA).
The full Senate is on recess following the Independence Day holiday but is expected to approve the NDAA after its scheduled return to Washington on July 20.
The Cantwell-Machin amendment also killed language that would have required the secretary of energy, in annual budget requests, to separate the NNSA budget from other DOE defense nuclear funding, such as cleanup of shuttered weapons production sites. Without the amendment, the committee NDAA would have required the energy secretary to list the NNSA’s budget as a separate budget subfunction from other atomic energy defense activities: a category that also includes legacy nuclear cleanup.
The amendment did not do away with the segment of the legislation that would require the Nuclear Weapons Council to certify that the NNSA’s budget request each year is adequate to meet the needs of the Pentagon’s nuclear-weapon mission, but it did eliminate a requirement that the secretary of energy adjust the agency’s budget request to accommodate the Defense Department determination.
Instead, the energy secretary would merely have to include the Pentagon’s preferred funding level for the NNSA, if that level differs from what the Energy Department proposed, in an appendix to the agency’s first-draft budget submission to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Cantwell is a top congressional advocate for remediation of the Hanford Site, the highly contaminated former plutonium production complex in her state. She and other lawmakers, plus Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette and the Energy Communities Alliance interest group, had complained that the Senate Armed Services Committee’s NDAA could allow the Defense Department to shortchange cleanup of shuttered Manhattan Project and Cold War facilities. If the energy secretary was forced by the Pentagon to add funding from her or his own budget to the NNSA, it could only come at the expense of other DOE programs.
