Federal agencies remained open for business this week, after President Donald Trump signed a stopgap budget bill that freezes most federal budgets at 2020 levels through Dec. 11 — meaning the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear weapons portfolio temporarily has a budget about $3 billion lower than what it requested.
The Senate on Wednesday cast votes to pass the short term continuing resolution with less than a working day left before the literal eleventh hour. The measure sailed through the upper chamber 84-10, with six senators not voting. Without the bill, federal appropriations would have lapsed after midnight.
Under the stopgap budget, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will get the annual equivalent of about $16.7 billion, which is some $3 billion less than requested.
NNSA had warned that any appropriation below the 2021 request will affect delivery of refurbished nuclear weapons to the military, and now the agency has exactly that for nearly the first quarter of the fiscal year that began early Thursday.
Hard hit under the continuing resolution are the NNSA’s stock-in-trade weapons modernization programs, and its effort to design and build plutonium-pit production facilities to make nuclear-weapon triggers in New Mexico and South Carolina.
Stockpile Major Modernization, the account funding major weapons refurbishments, would receive the equivalent of $2 billion a year, under the stopgap: some $500 million less than requested. An NNSA budget the House of Representative passed in July had essentially the requested funding for this account, though the House bill, like the continuing resolution, provided no funding to being early work on the proposed W93 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead.
The continuing resolution also has some $1 billion less than requested for the Production Modernization account that funds pit plants at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The Democrat-controlled House’s proposed NNSA appropriation for 2021 would have provided only a little more than the continuing resolution for pits: about $1.8 billion, compared with $1.6 billion in the stopgap. The NNSA asked for $2.5 billion.
The GOP-controlled Senate did not publish any appropriations bills over the summer. This year, the upper chamber has generally been more accommodating of the NNSA’s requests for more 2021 funding than has the House. However, Senators have been wary of increasing the NNSA budget at the expense of DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which cleans up shuttered Manhattan Project- and Cold War-era nuclear-weapons production sites.
