Two of the most important bills of the year for the National Nuclear Security Administration are slated for consideration on Wednesday, when the full House and a key committee will take up proposals to fund and authorize critical nuclear security programs for fiscal year 2020.
The House Armed Services Committee will vote on the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) even as the full House considers a multi-bill appropriations package, or minibus, that contains the Department of Energy’s spending bill for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
Both bills make good on House Democrats’ long-stated plans to defund the remaining work on the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched, ballistic missile warhead, and to scale back procurement of the next-generation of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is mostly done with the W76-2 program, having started manufacture of the warheads in January using $65 million in funding for fiscal year 2019, which ends Sept. 30. NNSA has said it will deliver the first of these weapons to the Navy, for use on Trident II D5 missiles on Ohio-class submarines, by Sept. 30.
However, both the NDAA and the appropriations bill would prohibit NNSA from spending $10 million on W76-2 in 2020, as the agency request in March.
The House-authored bills also would throw a major fork in NNSA’s plans to produce plutonium pits, fissile nuclear-weapon cores, for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
The NDAA awaiting a vote by the Armed Services Committee would urge NNSA to make future plutonium pits only at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, rather splitting the work between the lab and a new pit plant the agency wants to build at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The bill would also relieve the agency of a legal obligation to make 80 pits a year by the end of the 2020s; NNSA planned to lean on the proposed South Carolina pit plant for 50 of 80 pits a year by 2030.
The appropriations bill, meanwhile, would provide only about two thirds of the funding the NNSA requested for plutonium pit infrastructure: roughly $470 million instead of about $710 million. That would still be a 30% year-over-year increase for the plutonium program. Moreover, neither House bill explicitly forbids NNSA from building a pit plant in South Carolina.
While the House was slated to consider the multi-bill spending package Wednesday, it was not clear at deadline when the chamber would vote on the measure, or when it would begin debate on the NNSA portion of the proposal. The House Rules Committee had yet to write rules of debate for the minibus at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
On the other side of the Hill, the Senate has yet to start its own appropriations process at deadline. Senate appropriators this week postponed a classified hearing on nuclear modernization, including NNSA’s modernization work.
However, the upper chamber’s Armed Services Committee on May 23 approved its own version of the NDAA, which fully authorized both the W76-2 and the two-state pit complex — but the Senate had not scheduled a floor vote on its version of the NDAA at deadline.
