Nuclear spending debates in Congress often pit active weapons programs against the remediation of shuttered Manhattan Project and Cold War production sites, but this year’s proceeding has lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on guard against a provision they say could permanently subordinate legacy environmental programs to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) got the ball rolling Monday in a 10-minute floor speech, just before the full Senate voted to proceed with debate on the chamber’s 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The staunch ally of cleanup at the shuttered Hanford plutonium production complex in her state said it was “unbelievable” that Section 3111 of the $740 billion bill would require the secretary of energy to accede to the Pentagon’s opinion about whether the NNSA’s annual budget request is sufficient.
A companion House NDAA has no such provision.
Under the Senate Armed Services Committee’s NDAA, the joint DOE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council — chaired by the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment — would vet the NNSA’s budget request before it goes to the White House Office of Management and Budget for final approval.
If the council thinks the budget request is adequate, it must tell the secretary of energy so. If the council thinks the NNSA isn’t seeking enough money for any given weapons program, it can tell the secretary of energy that as well. The secretary would then be required to request that funding for the semiautonomous Energy Department nuclear-weapon branch.
That “leaves the Secretary with responsibility for the program, while removing his or her ability to effectively manage it,” Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette wrote in a letter Monday to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Giving the Pentagon “broad control over the NNSA’s budget, restricts the President’s capacity in exercising his responsibility to set budget levels, and subjects the priorities of NNSA to DOD discretion, potentially causing setbacks and underfunding of other critically important missions of the NNSA.”
A bipartisan group of influential senators with control of DOE budgets and policies also objected, writing in a Wednesday letter to the top Republicans and Democrats in the Armed Services Committee and full Senate that Section 3111 should be removed from the NDAA.
“As currently written, the Senate NDAA bill would strip the Secretary of Energy of the ability to manage some of the most sensitive national security programs that account for almost half of the Department’s budget,” wrote Cantwell and nine other lawmakers including Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chair of the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “Such changes could impede accountability and Congressional oversight, as well as imperil future funding for other critical DOE responsibilities such as promoting scientific and technological innovation, managing our National Laboratories, sponsoring basic research in the physical sciences, and ensuring cleanup of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex.”
“I can’t believe that we’re here, with all the things we have to deal with, a COVID crisis, an economic crisis, justice reform, and now we have to worry about people in the dark of night changing control of our Energy budget and turning it over to the DOD and giving them control of our nuclear arsenal,” Cantwell said Monday. “To say nothing of the concerns I have for what they will do to shortchange the Hanford cleanup budget that is a challenge to the nation.”
At $2 billion a year or more, Hanford, the former plutonium production site established during World War II, is the most expensive and challenging environmental cleanup handled by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
Cantwell said the Armed Services Committee did not consult the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee about its plans to give the Pentagon final sign-off on the NNSA’s budget.
“This is unacceptable. I know my colleague Sen. [Joe] Manchin (D-W.Va.) has worked on this and is trying to get a change to this legislation,” she said. “I hope that we are successful in either just pulling it out right now, admitting that it is the wrong approach and has not been discussed with the committee of jurisdiction, or at least having our colleagues having a vote on this.”
“This NNSA provision is modeled ‘exactly’ after @ONDCP [Office of National Drug Control Policy] statute,” Senate Armed Services Committee Majority Communications Director Marta Hernandez wrote Tuesday on Twitter, in a tweet as brief as it was intensely wonky. “Other related provisions in the #FY21NDAA are modeled after @ODNIgov [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] – so there is absolutely federal government and national security precedent for this.”
Despite her apparent displeasure over the Armed Services Committee’s tack, Cantwell was one of the 90 senators who voted to proceed with debate on the committeee’s NDAA. On Thursday, a day after the House Armed Services Committee approved its own version of the NDAA, Inhofe said the Senate would probably clear the upper chamber committee’s NDAA after the July 4 holiday. That will become procedurally possible after the full Senate votes to end debate on the bill by invoking cloture. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) filed for cloture on Thursday.
The House had not scheduled a floor vote at deadline Thursday.
Both the House and Senate Armed Services committees have now authorized the NNSA to spend roughly $20 billion in fiscal 2021: a figure NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty fought hard for during internal DOE budget negotiations, over Brouillette’s opposition. If those bills are reconciled and become law, and subsequent appropriations bills actually provide the funding, the NNSA would get more than a 20% raise from its 2020 budget of some $16.7 billion.
The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up its annual energy and water bill next week. The Senate Appropriations Committee had not announced a markup schedule at deadline Thursday.
