The National Nuclear Security Administration received the approval, though not the appropriation, to spend some $500 million more than requested for fiscal year 2022, under the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law Monday.
Aside from allowing the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons agency to spend more than $20 billion — a sum House and Senate appropriators must still approve — the bill grants the Joe Biden administration’s request that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) be allowed to extend the life of the megaton-capable B83 nuclear gravity bomb. The House was against the B83 life extension but the Senate was for it. The bill also contained a host of other policy directives for the NNSA.
The fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) also authorized the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to spend $6.84 billion, as requested, for Defense Environmental Cleanup at shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites. Defense Environmental Cleanup is the biggest of the three main Environmental Management budget lines.
Among other things, the latest NDAA continues a policy of payment in lieu of taxes to municipalities surrounding the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The Biden administration wanted to cancel those payments. Multiple presidential administrations have floated the idea of cancelling such payments in South Carolina and other states, but the proposals almost always die in Congress.
The NDAA sets policy and spending limits for defense programs. Separate appropriations bills provide the actual funding for these programs, but federal agencies on Tuesday remained locked at 2021 spending levels, under a continuing resolution that runs through Feb. 18.
Neither of the unreconciled appropriations bills passed this summer by the full House or the Senate Appropriations Committee would provide the $500 billion budget boost the NDAA allows for the NNSA, but appropriators could still work the figure into whatever final budget bill Congress eventually passes for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
Editors note, 12/28/2021, 3:33 p.m. Eastern time. The story was corrected to show that the bill funds the B83 life extension program.
