A compromise National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would authorize all the nuclear weapons spending the White House seeks for fiscal 2020 for passed the House in a landslide Wednesday evening, despite earlier threats of resistance from left-leaning Democrats.
The annual bill, which sets policy and spending limits for defense programs, passed 377-48. The “no” votes came from 41 Democrats, six Republicans, and independent Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.).
The $738 billion NDAA does not include Democrat-led provisions that would have slowed development of Department of Energy infrastructure that supports next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles, or Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent.
The legislation also bars DOE’s Office of Environmental Management from downgrading the treatment of certain high-level waste in Washington state to a lower hazard status that might permit the material to be disposed of somewhere other than a permanent geological repository. The agency in June revised its interpretation of the HLW definition, saying some of this material could be disposed of at low-level facilities. The NDAA language does not cover high-level waste at other Energy Department sites, and a pilot program is underway for radioactive wastewater at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The United States does not yet have a geologic repository for its high-level waste. As has been the case in recent years, Congress for 2020 blanked the Trump administration’s requests to resume funding for licensing the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. In the NDAA, it authorized none of the $26 million sought for defense nuclear watse disposal.
The NDAA authorizes some $16.5 billion in spending as requested for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), clearing the way for the semiautonomous DOE nuclear weapons agency to build a two-state plutonium pit-production complex. The two planned pit factories, one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and one at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. are due to annually produce 80 fissile nuclear-weapon cores by 2030 — a goal the NNSA admits it will be challenged to meet.
The Environmental Management (EM) office, meanwhile, will be authorized to spend more than $5.5 billion on its largest account, defense environmental cleanup, for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. That is roughly in line with the request, which is about 9% below the 2019 EM budget. Most DOE EM cleanups are authorized at the requested level or more, with offsets paid for by less-than-requested funding limits to demolish excess facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Authorization bills do not provide funding for federal programs, appropriations bills do. Congress has yet to pass a permanent appropriation for 2020, instead relying on short-term continuing resolutions to keep the federal government open. The second and latest stopgap will keep the government funded at 2019 levels through Dec. 20.
The Senate is expected to vote on the legislation by next week, Reuters reported. President Donald Trump has indicated he will sign the bill.
