‘Big Four’ Defense Lawmakers to Resume Defense Authorization Talks Next Week, Inhofe Says

With members of the House out of town this week, Congress made little progress on authorizing and appropriating government funding, including for Department of Energy defense-nuclear programs.

However, Armed Services Committee staffers worked behind the scenes this week to hash out differences in the House and Senate versions of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act: an annual military policy bill that for 2020 has been a battleground between Democrats’ preference to slow spending on next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles and low-yield weapons, and Republicans’ preference to fund them all.

The “Big Four” authorizers, Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, are likely to meet next week to catch up on where negotiations stand, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters this week.

Inhofe also said that he had not yet reviewed a compromise NDAA presented to him last week by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the House Armed Services chair.

Smith has said Democrats would not support authorizing any Pentagon funding to build President Donald Trump’s proposed southern border wall. As late as last weekend, Trump would not rule out allowing the government to shut down rather than signing a funding bill without money for the wall to keep the government operating once the current stopgap measure expires on Nov. 21, Government Executive and other news organizations reported.

Fiscal 2020 began on Oct. 1 with the House having passed most of its appropriations bills but the Senate approving none. Congress instead passed a continuing resolution that Trump signed on Sept. 27.

Under the current continuing resolution, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration receives the annualized equivalent of roughly $15 billion: much lower than either the 2020 request of $16.5 billion, the $16 billion recommended by the House for 2020, or the $17 billion the Senate’s DOE spending bill would provide.

Wall funding is only one of the sticking points in Smith’s negotiations with the White House, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said this week.

Smith has “let us know he’s talking to them … that’s what he’s indicated to us,” Reed told reporters Tuesday. “If it was just one issue, we would almost be there.”

Reed echoed Inhofe’s indication that a Big Four meeting would be imminent. In the meantime, “we’re hoping that the staff can continue to narrow the differences,” he said.

Inhofe said the prospect of passing a so-called “skinny NDAA” for fiscal 2020, as opposed to a full bill, would be better known in December. He re-emphasized that that would be a last resort to pass the bare minimum of authorizations for the U.S. military.

Smith, the spear tip for House Democrats who generally share the same views, wants to slow procurement of the next generation of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. That includes authorizing only about two-thirds of the $710-plus million the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) requested to build and expand a pair of factories capable of making fissile nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits.

Smith also opposes allowing the Navy to deploy the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead that the NNSA has built for the service. Smith fears the weapon, which the Donald Trump administration says is needed to deter Russia from using similarly sized nuclear weapons to quickly start or win a war it cannot win with conventional weapons, would make all-out nuclear exchange more likely. The NNSA got $65 million for that weapon in 2019 and sought another $10 million for 2020.

Meanwhile, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told reporters this week that he plans to work with his House Democratic counterpart, House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), to try to speed up the appropriations process for outstanding fiscal 2020 spending bills, including those funding the Pentagon and the Department of Energy.

Most immediately, the two lead appropriators will need to agree upon a deadline for a new continuing resolution as Congress now has less than a week’s worth of legislative days before the current continuing resolution expires. Absent a new stopgap deal, the government would shut down on Nov. 22.