Congress had not produced a compromise National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2020 as of Friday morning, prolonging a lack of authorization for key nuclear modernization programs.
It was a week of whiplash predictions from top defense authorizers Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who in the aggregate appeared less certain of a deal at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor than when they returned from Thanksgiving recess.
Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, insisted all week that compromise was imminent. On Thursday, he even told reporters on Capitol Hill that there could be a deal before Friday. Yet also on Thursday, Inhofe warned that House Democrats and the White House were not as close to an accord as he thought earlier in the week.
Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Thursday morning that NDAA conferees from both chambers of Congress “have a couple of areas that are not resolved as much as I thought they were yesterday.” Inhofe would not discuss specifics of the hangup. He did say that he spoke on the phone with President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening when the president returned from the NATO Summit London, and had an in-person meeting with Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Thursday morning.
Fiscal 2020 began on Oct. 1 without a new congressionally approved NDAA in place. Inhofe said that “everyone is aware” of the impending deadline to complete negotiations and pass the bill by Dec. 13, which was at deadline the Senate’s last scheduled legislative day before the Christmas holiday.
This comes as Congress is also striving to pass full-year appropriations bills. It has yet to send any such legislation to the president, instead passing stopgap spending measures. The second and latest continuing resolution expires on Dec. 20.
Smith told reporters Thursday that there have been multiple “hiccups” on the road to an NDAA compromise, but that he also believed a resolution was possible as soon as Friday.
The NDAA sets policy and spending limits for defense programs, including the nuclear-weapon stewardship managed by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The House NDAA would offer about $15.8 billion for the NNSA: 4% less than sought by the White House but about 4.5% more than the 2019 budget. The Senate NDAA would authorize the requested funding.
The Senate is all in on the current 30-year nuclear-weapons modernization program started by the Barack Obama administration in 2016, but Smith wants to slow the program. Specifically, he wants to scale back work on the next-generation of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and prohibit the Navy from deploying the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead that the Trump administration added to the modernization program in 2018.
Smith in October said he probably would not succeed in blocking W76-2, which the Senate and White House strongly support. The relatively inexpensive new weapon — the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) spent $65 million on it in 2019 and requested $10 million for 2020 — is needed to deter Russia from using its own low-yield nuclear weapons to quickly win a conflict in which Moscow could not prevail with only conventional weapons, according to the authors of the administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review
However, Smith has stuck to his guns, publicly at least, about slowing Department of Energy and Department of Defense programs to replace the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles with planned Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles.
On the DOE side, the House NDAA would authorize only about two-thirds of the funding the NNSA requested to build its planned two-state, plutonium pit complex in fiscal 2020: about $470 million, compared with some $710 million requested. The Senate NDAA authorizes the full request. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico would start making the fissile cores for W87-1-style warheads in 2024, while a planned facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would start making pits in 2030.
For the NNSA’s W87-1 warhead life-extension program itself, the Senate NDAA authorizes the roughly $110 million the White House requested, but the House’s NDAA would slash that by more than half to just $53 million.
Smith declined to delve into the details of his negotiating priorities on Thursday.
“I am not going to answer any more questions about this, until we finalize the bill,” Smith told reporters, including NS&D Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily. “And then I’ll answer questions about what is actually in it, and why.”
Vivienne Machi, staff report for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily, contributed to this story from Washington.
