The House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday began to ink the contours of the 2021 nuclear weapons budget fight to come, when the panel’s chair wondered why the White House wants to give the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) a $2.5 billion raise with the agency sitting on $8 billion in unspent appropriations.
The White House’s controversial plan to plus up funding for the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency to nearly $20 billion would mean the Navy can fund only a single Virginia-class attack submarine in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, rather than the pair it wanted.
“If we got $8 billion hanging out in there that we haven’t spent as planned, I question the wisdom of grabbing $2.5 billion to add to that,” House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said in a hearing on the Department of Defense’s 2021 budget request of about $705 billion.
The ranking Republican on the committee warned the NNSA might already have plans for the $8 billion that Smith, only one hearing into the 2021 budget cycle, is already eyeing.
“I think it’s up to us to dig deeper into exactly where those [unspent NNSA] funds come from,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas.) said during the hearing. “Are they intended for a particular purpose? A construction project that’s delayed? A weapon refurbishment for example, that’s been delayed, and I know we’ve got some of that.”
An NNSA spokesperson said by email Thursday only a fraction of its $8 billion in carry-over funding has not been obligated to any particular activity: “NNSA ended fiscal year 2019 with $8 billion in carryover balances, of which $384 million was unobligated at the end of fiscal year 2019.”
At the hearing Wednesday, both Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley were cool to the plan to clip a Virginia sub from the budget.
“[M]y gut tells me we need more attack submarines than planned,” Esper testified Wednesday.
The Navy is starting to build Block V Virginia-class submarines: the latest iteration of the attack vessel that replaces Los Angeles-class boats. These attack submarines are nuclear powered, but do not carry nuclear weapons. In December, the Navy gave General Dynamics Electric Boat a $22.2 billion contract to build nine Virginia-class subs by 2029, with an option for a 10th boat.
On Wednesday, Esper and Milley offered ways to lessen financial the blow to the Navy’s shipbuilding program, and showed some support for the civilian weapons complex.
Esper proposed that Congress let the Navy sweep up unspent funds from non-shipbuilding accounts at the end of the a fiscal year and transfer them into the service’s Shipbuilding and Conversion budget. That would make up for at least some of the money the White House wants to send to the NNSA.
“We think that could generate at least $1 billion a year or so that we could plunge back into ship building,” Esper said. “[T]hat’s something that other departments of the federal government already have available to them,” he added, without referencing the NNSA.
The White House has requested a $19.8-billion budget for the NNSA in fiscal 2021, which would be 20% higher than the 2020 appropriation of $16.7 billion, and billions of dollars more than the agency forecast last year that it would need in the upcoming year.
The agency’s Weapons Activities budget, which includes funding for nuclear weapons refurbishments and the rebuilding of the weapons production complex, is in line for a 25% raise to more than $15.5 billion. That accounts for almost the entire budget increase NNSA seeks in the coming fiscal year.
