At deadline Friday, Congress appeared on track to pass a just-in-time stopgap budget that will force the National Nuclear Security Administration to operate for nearly three months with a budget that’s about $3 billion a year less than what the agency says it needs to keep nuclear maintenance and modernization programs on time.
The Senate planned to take up the bill next week, which could leave just enough time to send it to President Donald Trump’s desk in time to avert an election-year shutdown after Sept. 30. The measure got through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support on Tuesday.
The so-called continuing resolution stretches 2020 budgets to Dec. 11 and would be an especially raw deal for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) programs to modernize Air Force warheads, and for the NNSA’s planned plutonium pit factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is supposed to produce war-ready nuclear-weapon triggers in only a few years.
As of Friday, neither the GOP Senate majority, nor Democrats in the minority, had signaled any intention to delay the stopgap budget bill. Likewise, Trump had not threatened to veto the measure.
The bill would keep the NNSA at the annualized level of $16.7 billion, which is around $3 billion lower than the roughly $20 billion the agency requested for fiscal 2021.
“As the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Defense have expressed to Congress previously, significant funding shortfalls for the NNSA Weapons Activities account below the FY21 President’s budget request will result in the inability of NNSA to meet planned milestones and delivery schedules for the DoD,” an NNSA spokesperson in Washington said Friday. “Specific impacts due to the Continuing Resolution will be dependent on the duration and specific implementation directions. NNSA will work to the extent possible to mitigate the effects of the [continuing resolution].”
The stopgap is also more than $1 billion lower than what the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives approved for NNSA in 2021, as part of a spending package passed in July.
The House’s proposal was well lower than what the NNSA says it needs to avoid delays to weapons scheduled to start deploying to the military between roughly 2021 and 2030, but even that budget would have been better in nearly every way than the stopgap the civilian nuclear weapons steward now seems sure to get stuck with.
The House’s 2021 budget bill had essentially all the requested Stockpile Major Modernization funding for the NNSA’s ongoing, bread-and-butter nuclear-weapon refurbishments, plus more Production Modernization funding than in 2020 for pit production at Los Alamos. On the other hand, the House’s budget would bust Savannah River pits below the 2020 level.
The NNSA also has appropriations left over from other budget years, though as agency Administration Lisa Gordon-Hagerty has pointed out repeatedly and at length in congressional testimony this year, the majority of this funding is already ticketed for infrastructure and international programs, and the agency does not view it as a rainy day fund for years in which the appropriations process goes haywire, or does not produce the requested budget.
Under the looming stopgap, NNSA’s Stockpile Major Modernization account would be stuck at just over $2 billion, some $500 million less than either the House bill or the request. The House budget did not have $53 million requested to begin development of a proposed W93 submarine launched ballistic missile warhead — the bipartisan continuing resolution does not, either — but it did have the requested funding for the NNSA’s four ongoing nuke refurbs. Some of the four are still in early stages, like design feasibility, while others are hardly more than a year from the start of mass production.
The big hits under the stopgap will be to NNSA’s W87-1 Modification Program, for the Air Force’s planned Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missile, and the W80-4 Life Extension Program for the service’s Long Range Standoff weapon air-launched cruise missile. W87-1 would get just over $110 million, or about $430 million less than requested, and W80-4 would get $1 billion, which is about $100 million less than the continuing resolution.
Those two programs are much further away from mass production than the two others funded by the account, the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb and the W88 Alt 370 submarine launched ballistic missile warhead. B61-12 could be ready for mass production a little after November 2021, W88 Alt 370 a little after July 2021.
Meanwhile, Production Modernization, which funds pit infrastructure, would get $1.6 billion under the continuing resolution, compared with $2.5 billion requested and $1.8 billion under the House bill.
The House was not willing to meet the 2021 request for either pit plant, but it was willing to give the Los Alamos pit plant a roughly $370-million raise, compared with 2020. On the other hand, the Savannah River plant would have gotten $103 million less than in 2020, under the House bill.
Under the continuing resolution, Los Alamos pit upgrades would get about $almost $310 million, some $530 million less than requested, while Savannah River pit upgrades would get $410 million, or around $30 million less than requested.
The House’s stance on pits appeared certain to start a fight with Senate appropriators this year, but amid the coronavirus pandemic that ate up nearly the whole 2020 legislative session and a presidential election that, practically since inauguration day 2017 has shaped up as a referendum on President Trump, the upper chamber never finished, let alone voted on, any appropriations bills.
