Once again, the Congressional Budget Office’s biennial cost estimate for the 10 years of nuclear modernization spending has arrived just in time for the yearly federal budget debate on Capitol Hill.
The latest congressionally mandated report from the non-partisan office covers planned spending from 2021 through 2030, during which Pentagon and Department of Energy programs are estimated to ring in at a total of $634 billion: $405 billion for the Department of Defense and $229 million for DOE. That’s about $140 billion higher than the previous estimate from 2019, or a jump of 28%.
Combined annual spending for nuclear modernization will ring in at a total of $60 billion over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in the report published Monday and titled, “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2019 to 2028.” CBO’s spending estimates typically rise with every report as more planned modernization programs enter production or construction phases and more inflation-adjusted years trickle into the estimate.
“The largest contributions to the $140 billion increase are higher costs for nuclear delivery systems and weapons, including costs for weapons laboratories and supporting activities,” CBO wrote in its report.
The Joe Biden administration was scheduled to release its detailed federal budget request for fiscal year 2022 on Friday. The federal budget request is notionally due in February and previous CBO nuclear modernization spending reports have appeared in December, January and February.
Some congressional Democrats and non-government advocates have pressed the Biden administration to hold off on planned budget increases for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which maintains and modernizes nuclear warheads, bombs and the production infrastructure needed to keep those aging weapons at their military-specified destructive power.
For fiscal year 2021, which runs through Oct. 1, the NNSA requested and received a substantial budget increase: $20 billion or so instead of the roughly $16.5 billion the agency previously estimated it would need. NNSA also hiked its short-term spending outlook last year as part of its fiscal year 2021 budget request.
In the fiscal year 2021 budget request, the NNSA estimated it would need a total of $62 billion for 2022 through 2024. In its 2020 budget request, NNSA forecast it would need $52.5 billion over that three-year period. The estimates are part of the Future-Years Nuclear Defense Program outlook the NNSA publishes annually in its budget request.
Last year, during the fierce appropriations debate that preceded and then ran through the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election, then-NNSA administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said that if the agency received the budget contained in the Future-Years Nuclear Defense Program from the 2020 budget request, the agency would not be able to deliver warheads for new intercontinental ballistic missiles and air-launched cruise missiles in time to meet deployments planned for 2030 or so.
Most of the NNSA’s budget increase for fiscal year 2021 was for a pair of planned factories to produce plutonium pits, the fissile triggers of nuclear-weapon primary stages. The planned facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., will initially produce pits for the W87-1 warhead to be used in the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent: the intercontinental ballistic missile that will replace Minuteman III.
CBO estimates the 30-year nuclear modernization regimen started by the Barack Obama administration 2016 will cost about $1.2 trillion.
