A bill unveiled Saturday authorizes the National Nuclear Security Administration to spend slightly less than requested in 2025 and makes the agency’s production facilities a legal part of U.S. nuclear deterrence.
The agency would be allowed to spend about $24.9 billion in fiscal year 2025 under a compromise National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). That would be about $57 million less than requested, making for only about a 0.2% difference of opinion between Congress and the White House this year.
The House Rules Committee was scheduled to consider the bill Monday at 4:00 p.m., meaning a House floor vote can take place no earlier than that. Each chamber must approve this version of the bill, negotiated behind closed doors by a bicameral conference committee, for it to be eligible to become law.
The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is now operating under a stopgap spending bill under the annualized equivalent of its 2024 budget of roughly $24.1 billion. That temporary appropriation runs out Dec. 20.
The annual NDAA, which is not an appropriations bill, sets policy and spending limits for defense agencies, including the NNSA. This year’s bill would amend the law that created the NNSA to declare that the agency’s weapons production infrastructure and nuclear know-how contribute to the “deterrence of strategic attacks.”
The 2025 NDAA would also make clear that NNSA’s mission requires “fulfilling, to the maximum extent possible, the requirements for nuclear weapons of the Department of Defense.”
The latest NDAA would also:
- Allow the NNSA to modify and develop the B61-13, a version of the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb with more earth-penetrating capability.
- Prohibit NNSA from getting rid of the W76-2, a lower-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, either by retiring them or turning them back into W76-1 warheads, the higher-yield variety. The lower-yield weapon was intended to deter smaller nuclear strikes by an enemy who calculated that the U.S. would only retaliate with a similarly sized nuclear weapon.
- Require the secretary of energy to identify at least two and up to four locations for a new defense-uranium enrichment facility. The secretary’s report would be due 90 days after the 2025 NDAA becomes law.
- Withhold 10% of the NNSA administrator’s travel budget until the agency reports to Congress on ways to streamline “contracting procurement, construction and material acquisition.” Congress ordered this report in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, which became law on Dec. 22.
- Let NNSA management and operations contractors arrange for “passenger carrier services” to and from agency sites and a mass transit station. The NNSA would foot the bill for these services, the bill said.
- Withhold 10% of the travel budget for Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy’s travel budget would be withheld until the assistant secretary provides Congress with a “briefing on options for enhancing National Nuclear Security Administration access to the defense industrial base.”
One thing the final NDAA did not include was a Senate proposal to cut the NNSA administrator’s travel budget in half until the agency wrote a report about developing a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 warhead for a planned sea-launched cruise missile.
Editor’s note, Dec. 12, 2024, 1:54 p.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to include the correct percentage difference between the proposed NNSA spending limit authorized by the 2025 NDAA and the White House’s request.
