The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which the House passed on Wednesday, would set the National Nuclear Security Administration’s spending cap at $24.9 billion for the fiscal year.
The number, hashed out last weekend behind closed doors by a bicameral conference committee, is only about 0.2%, or $57 million, less than what the White House requested. It is also a little less than what appropriators in both chambers of Congress approved in competing spending bills that still need to be reconciled.
The compromise National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) should get a vote in the Senate next week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday.
The NDAA’s cap is about $261 million less than what Senate appropriators proposed and about $527 million less than what House appropriators recommended in bills that stalled in Congress this summer.
When the appropriations process broke down earlier this year, the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was left at the 2024 level: the annual equivalent of $24.1 billion. The appropriation runs out Dec. 20. House appropriators have told the Exchange Monitor that there might be another extension of 2024 funding, through March.
The latest NDAA’s authorization for weapons activities, NNSA’s bread-and-butter nuclear weapons programs and its single largest spending account, was almost $20 billion. That’s about $132 million, or 0.7%, more than what the White House requested. It is also $51 million more than what Senate appropriators proposed and about $358 million less than what House appropriators recommended in their unreconciled bills.
The annual NDAA, which is not an appropriations bill, sets policy and spending limits for defense agencies, including the NNSA.
The NDAA would authorize $70 million for the W80-X sea-launched cruise missile warhead. The NNSA sought the funding in its unfunded priorities list that supplemented its official budget request. President Joe Biden has opposed making a nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile, which at the business end would use a variant of the warhead the NNSA is refurbishing for an air-launched cruise missile.
NNSA’s other warheads and bombs — including the B61-12 life extension program, the W88 alternation program, the W80-4 life extension program, the W87-1 modification program, the W93 and the B61-13 gravity bomb — were authorized for the requested funding.
Meanwhile, the bill authorized $2.4 billion for NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account. That is about $179 million, or 7%, below the White House’s request, roughly $179 million less than what Senate appropriators proposed and $6 million more than what House appropriators recommended.
NNSA’s federal salaries and expenses account would be authorized for $539 million under the NDAA, which is $25.5 million, or 4.5%, less than what the White House request: a level the House and Senate appropriations committees each agreed to meet.
NNSA’s naval reactors account would be authorized $1.9 billion under the NDAA, which is $150 million, or 7.1%, less than the White House requested. While the House recommended the same amount that the White House requested for naval reactors, Senate appropriators wanted to provide $108 million more than the NDAA would authorize.
The final bill would authorize a total of $895.2 billion, and would authorize $33.3 billion for the Department of Energy and $849.9 million for the Pentagon.
On the policy side of things, the latest NDAA would also:
- Amend the law that created the NNSA to declare that the agency’s weapons production infrastructure and nuclear know-how contribute to the “deterrence of strategic attacks.”
- Codify that the NNSA’s mission requires “fulfilling, to the maximum extent possible, the requirements for nuclear weapons of the Department of Defense.”
- Allow the NNSA to modify and develop the B61-13, a version of the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb with more earth-penetrating capability.
- Prohibit NNSA from getting rid of the W76-2, a lower-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, either by retiring them or turning them back into W76-1 warheads, the higher-yield variety. The lower-yield weapon was intended to deter smaller nuclear strikes by an enemy who calculated that the U.S. would only retaliate with a similarly sized nuclear weapon.
- Require the secretary of energy to identify at least two and up to four locations for a new defense-uranium enrichment facility. The secretary’s report would be due 90 days after the 2025 NDAA becomes law.
- Withhold 10% of the NNSA administrator’s travel budget until the agency reports to Congress on ways to streamline “contracting procurement, construction and material acquisition.” Congress ordered this report in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, which became law on Dec. 22.
- Let NNSA management and operations contractors arrange for “passenger carrier services” to and from agency sites and a mass transit station. The NNSA would foot the bill for these services, the bill said.
- Withhold 10% of the travel budget for Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy’s travel budget would be withheld until the assistant secretary provides Congress with a “briefing on options for enhancing National Nuclear Security Administration access to the defense industrial base.”
