Congress’ final 2019 budget bill for the National Nuclear Security Administration, unveiled in detail Tuesday, would increase funding for maintenance and cleanup to buildings across the nuclear weapons complex, decrease funding for a controversial plutonium-disposal project, and provide initial funding to produce a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead.
The House and Senate are set to vote on the bill, part of a so-called minibus appropriations package that funds the Department of Energy and other federal agencies, this week. The measure has more than $15 billion for DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): the steward of the U.S. nuclear-weapons stockpile. That is a little over $100 million more than requested.
In what amounts to the biggest funding concession in the compromise bill, the Senate acceded to the House’s plan to boost the NNSA’s infrastructure and operations budget above the requested level. The account, which mostly funds maintenance and improvements at NNSA’s eight main field sites, would get about $3.1 billion in fiscal 2019, if President Donald Trump signs the bill. That is nearly 4 percent lower than the current budget, but about 3 percent more than requested for the budget year that starts Oct. 1.
Elsewhere in the bill, Congress provided $220 million for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina: a nearly 35-percent cut from 2018 levels, and in line with the White House’s request. The facility is being built to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel, but the NNSA wants to convert the MFFF into a factory for plutonium nuclear-warhead cores.
The legislation also provides $65 million for the new low-yield warhead the Trump administration called for in February in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. However, Congress ordered the NNSA to provide a more detailed funding request for the weapon in its fiscal 2020 budget, which is notionally due the first week of February 2019. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an April appropriations hearing that the low-yield warhead would cost a combined total of $125 million in fiscal years 2019 and 2020.
