The now-ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) has signaled his support for a $750 billion topline for the Pentagon’s fiscal 2020 budget request, one of the highest estimates to emerge in recent reports.
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who chaired the committee from 2014 until the Democrats took back the House earlier this month, told reporters on Tuesday that $750 billion was “reasonable” to keep the Defense Department funded while accounting for growth.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), now chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, thinks it is less reasonable. In December, Thornberry’s longtime colleague in the lower chamber’s Armed Services Committee told reporters there is a “mountain of evidence that we can survive for less than $750 billion.”
That appraisal, together with Smith’s ambitions to rein in the 30-year, $1 trillion nuclear modernization program started by the Barack Obama administration and supplemented by the Donald Trump administration, might foreshadow some austerity for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The House and Senate Armed Services committees authorize spending limits for the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency each year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act. The NNSA then receives its yearly budget from the Congress’ Appropriations energy and water subcommittees.
The NNSA has a roughly $15 billion budget for fiscal 2019, which ends Sept. 30. Total Pentagon spending for the year is almost $675 billion.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) has said the Pentagon budget must grow at least 3 percent year over year in 2020 to keep defense spending flat, after accounting for inflation. Inhofe has also opposed cuts to nuclear modernization programs, including canceling the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead requested by the Trump administration and funded at $65 million for 2019 by the GOP-controlled Congress.
Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in November. Smith has said he will try to cancel the W76-2 low-yield warhead the GOP-controlled congress funded last year, and which the NNSA plans to build this year. The Trump administration requested the weapon, which it wants to use to check similarly capable Russian weapons, in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review released last year.
Vivienne Machi, Air Force, aerospace and Congress reporter for NS&D Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily, contributed to this report from Washington.
