The Department of Defense would get close to its requested funding for most strategic nuclear weapons programs in fiscal 2021, under a spending bill approved on a party-line vote Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee.
The bill passed 30-22 with no Republican support. Nobody offered amendments that would affect nuclear weapons funding during the four-hour markup, which this year was dominated by partisan debate about abortion, the southern border wall and other hot-button issues that provided lawmakers in an election year with opportunities to update their voting records.
As with the energy and water appropriations bill the committee approved Monday, the roughly $700 billion legislation would block the Pentagon from spending funds on a yield-producing nuclear weapons test. No lawmaker attempted to strike that language from the bill, which now awaits a vote — not scheduled, at deadline — on the House floor. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not released its proposed Defense Department for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
The House bill would provide:
- Nearly $2.9 billion, just $30 million shy of the request, to begin building the first of 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines: the eventual replacement for the Ohio-class boats in service now, and which are supposed to go on patrol in the early 2030s. With the program entering development and shipbuilding about to start, the budget is set to rise by more than $1 billion from the 2020 appropriation.
- About $2.9 billion for the B-21 Raider stealth bomber Northrop Grumman is developing: even with the request, and some $135 million below the 2020 appropriation for the aircraft that eventually will be able to carry both nuclear gravity bombs and cruise missiles.
- Some $1.45 billion for the initial batch of Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) silo-based, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are slated to replace the Minuteman III fleet starting around 2030. That clips the request by some $60 million, which House appropriators tagged as excess to need, but is better than half again as much as in 2020, when Boeing and Northrop Grumman were still developing competing concepts for the next-generation missile. In 2021, the Air Force is expected to award Northrop, the sole remaining competitor, a 12-year, $25 billion engineering and manufacturing development contract to build the first GBSD missiles. The system will use a mixture of W87-0 and W87-1 warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The Air Force plans to acquire more than 650 GBSD missiles, of which 400 will go into existing silos.
- Almost $305 million for the Long-Range Standoff cruise missile, the planned replacement for the nuclear-tipped AGM-86b air-launched cruise missile now carried by B52-H bombers. The House committee provided $170 million less than the request, writing in the bill report that the Air Force does not need all the funding it requested in fiscal 2021 for technology maturation. This year, the service picked Raytheon over Lockheed to develop the weapon, ending a three-year competitive design phase for the next-generation cruise missile. The program has a roughly $710 billion budget for 2020, which Congress approved when the Pentagon was still carrying two contractors. The Air Force plans to buy about 1,000 Long-Range Standoff weapon missiles, which will use W80-4 provided the NNSA.
