The U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons programs would be funded at prior-year levels almost through the end of December, under a second stopgap spending plan announced Thursday to keep the federal government operating while Congress tries to finalize its fiscal 2020 budget.
Meanwhile, the top Democrat and Republican members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees plan to meet next week to try, once again, to finalize the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Depending on the results of those negotiations, which have dragged on since July, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) could be blocked from investing as much funding as it wants in programs that support the next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent.
Media reported this week that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Pelosi’s regular point of contact for budget negotiations in the Donald Trump administration, met Thursday with the senior Republican and Democrat members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees.
After the meeting, House Appropriations Committee Chair Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) told the Washington Post and other news organizations that Congress would issue another continuing resolution to keep the government open until Dec. 20. President Donald Trump will still have to sign the bill, which Congress had not written at deadline Friday. Politico reported Friday that Congress is gearing up to pass the bill ahead of the Thursday deadline to keep the federal government operating.
Under another “clean” continuing resolution — one without “anomalies” that allow certain programs to exceed their year-ago budgets — the NNSA will be relegated to month-to-month funding at the annualized equivalent of about $15.2 billion: 8.5% lower than the agency’s 2020 requested budget of $16.5 billion.
Fiscal year began Oct. 1 with the government funded at 2019 levels under a continuing resolution passed Sept. 27. The House had passed almost all of its annual appropriations bills by the end of the 2019 fiscal year, but the Senate got bogged down about whether to spend Pentagon funds on Trump’s proposed southern border wall and passed no appropriations bills.
The kick of the can did little to get things moving in the Senate, which has passed only one funding bill since fiscal 2020 began. Still waiting on a floor vote in the upper chamber is a package of appropriations measures covering the Pentagon, Energy Department, and other agencies.
Before Congress passed the first continuing resolution of fiscal 2020, an informed source said it sought an anomaly that could have allowed it to design, and procure equipment for, the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program. That project is intended to dilute weapon-usable plutonium at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina for eventual burial at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. Congress did not allow the anomaly. The NNSA requested about $80 million for fiscal 2020 for Surplus Plutonium Disposition.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told reporters the lower chamber would not agree to the so-called “skinny” fiscal 2020 NDAA proposed by his Senate counterpart, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Earlier this week, the Senate unanimously agreed to suspend consideration of Inhofe’s bill, which would have authorized only a few of the defense-nuclear programs covered by a full NDAA.
As far as NNSA programs are concerned, the main sticking points between the House and Senate, both in appropriations bills and their NDAAs, are how much to spend in 2020 to build a new plutonium pit complex.
The NNSA wants to build a new factory at the Savannah River Site and upgrade existing facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, so the agency can annually cast 80 fissile nuclear-weapon cores by 2030. Los Alamos would manufacture 30 pits annually, with the remaining coming from Savannah River, in a plant to be built from the remains of the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The House appropriations bill and the House NDAA provide only about two-thirds of the funding the NNSA requested to build out its plutonium pit infrastructure in fiscal 2020: about $470 million, compared with some $710 million requested. The Senate NDAA authorizes the full request, and the Senate’s appropriations bill would give the NNSA’s pit-funding Plutonium Sustainment account even more than requested: $720 million or so.
But a continuing resolution would mean Plutonium Sustainment gets only 45% of the funding the NNSA sought for fiscal 2020: roughly $360 million. The pits the NNSA would produce under this program would initially be for W87-1-style warheads, which are slated for use aboard the next generation of intercontinental ballsitic missiles, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent.
A continuing resolution would hurt just about everything in the NNSA weapons portfolio, including ongoing modernization work on the B61 nuclear gravity bomb; the W88 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead; and early work on the program to modernize the W80-4 cruise missile warhead for decades more service starting in 2025 aboard the Pentagon’s planned Long-Range Standoff Weapon.
Overall, NNSA nuclear weapons activities would be stuck at just over $11 billion under a continuing resolution. That is more than 10% below the 2020 request of about $12.5 billion.
Vivienne Machi, reporter for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily, contributed to this report from Washington.
