WASHINGTON — In the second week of 2021 budget hearings on Capitol Hill, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) eye-popping $20-billion request bled into a hearing about another agency and tractor-beamed appropriations leaders into subcommittees they sometimes ignore, lending credence to one lawmaker’s prediction that nuclear modernization will be “the most contentious issue” of Congress’ national defense debate this year.
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the retiring ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, made the prediction at a think-tank breakfast on Monday. The representative of NNSA’s Pantex Plant proffered the prognostication a week after the Secretary of Defense and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff squirmed uncomfortably before the Armed Services Committee at the prospect of giving up an attack submarine this year to plus up the civilian nuclear weapons complex.
Subsequent proceedings this week on Capitol Hill made Thornberry appear prescient.
On Tuesday, the Armed Services Committee took time out of a hearing with the secretary of the Air Force and its uniformed chief of staff to debate the propriety of the NNSA 2021 budget request — a proposed increase of 25% over the 2020 appropriation of $16.7 billion.
According to a report from The Dispatch, President Donald Trump in January scrapped an NNSA budget request that was substantially lower than the one released last month, directing instead that Congress be asked to fund the higher number supported by conservative lawmakers and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty.
“The NNSA budget was roughly $17.5 billion, there was concern about that, at the last minute, there was $2.5 billion put back in and taken away from some other things,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said by way of summary in Tuesday’s Air Force budget hearing. “And those ‘some other things’ are not happy about it.”
Chief among the “other things” is one of the Virginia-class submarines the Navy wanted to start building in the budget year that commences Oct. 1.
Smith asked what the Air Force knew about the January budget rewrite that boosted the NNSA. Service officials demurred, with outgoing Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein telling Smith only that the move “didn’t have an impact on the Air Force.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Gordon-Hagerty herself appeared on Capitol Hill to defend the her agency’s budget.
The NNSA chief started her advocacy in the the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, where majority Democrats pressed their main line of attack: that the NNSA has $8 billion in carry-over funding left from fiscal 2019, and any money appropriated on top of that would just be hoarded for the agency’s future comfort while other programs go wanting. The NNSA says these funds are mostly obligated to programs that need them, but that has done little to convince lawmakers to bulk up the reserves.
Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.) was one of those skeptics. On Tuesday, she asked a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigator who testified alongside Gordon-Hagerty whether the NNSA could flex up the nuclear security enterprise to digest the funding surge it seeks.
That would be “very challenging,” Allison Bawden, director of the GAO’s Natural Resources and Environment team, told Davis. “There are really two ways to do that … hiring people and increasing activity on their contracts. There are plans to do that … and we do see a lot of hiring activity among the contractors, but that spend rate has to go up very quickly to not see those balances.”
On everyone’s mind in hearings this week is the sudden discrepancy between the NNSA budget request offered just weeks ago and the agency’s prediction a year back about what it would need now. The delta is about $3 billion.
Gordon-Hagerty defended the shift with passion.
She told the strategic forces subcommittee it resulted from a yearlong review last year of the NNSA’s arm of the ongoing 30-year nuclear arsenal modernization: a review she said she “personally shepherded,” and which involved the directors of the agency’s nuclear weapons laboratories and production sites.
“This was not just a number that we grabbed,” Gordon-Hagerty said Tuesday. “I asked, in our internal discussions … ‘will you be able to execute if we receive these resources, if they’re appropriated by Congress?’ And the answer was a resounding ‘yes.'”
Some Republicans were buying in. Ranking Member Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said the NNSA request was “just enough, and just in time.”
But subcommittee Chairman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) was more or less silent in the open hearing. Cooper said he was holding his powder for a classified hearing that followed the strategic forces open session on Tuesday. Following suit, uncharacteristically, was Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), one of Congress’ most reliable nuclear skeptics and a scathing critic of NNSA’s fiscal 2021 plans.
After Tuesday’s open session, and whatever grilling took place later in the closed hearing, Gordon-Hagerty was granted a night’s sleep and lunch before heading back to Capitol Hill on Wednesday. This time she appeared before House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, which will write the first draft of the NNSA’s 2021 budget bill.
Such is the gravity of the NNSA’s request this year that Reps. Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) and Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, showed up to the hearing to quiz Gordon-Hagerty about the agency’s progress in making up for delays to the B61-12 bomb and W88 Alt-370 warhead refurbishments.
Gordon-Hagerty told the two defense appropriators that the already-disclosed delays to those programs, which pushed the first production unit of the B61-12 to 2022 from 2020 and the W88 Alt 370 to 2021 from 2019, would not delay their later entry into service aboard B2 bombers and Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
The NNSA’s decision last year to use custom electrical capacitors in the B61-12 and W88 Alt-370, rather than stockpiled commercially sourced units recently found unsuitable for the weapons, caused a cascading delay throughout the nuclear security enterprise. For example, the Air Force’s program to design and produce a new fuse for the W87 intercontinental ballistic missile has been pushed back by up to two years, the service disclosed in its 2021 budget request. The capacitor issue has created extra work for the Kansas City National Security Complex, which will also make the fuses.
Visclosky and Calvert, with their own subcommittee to run, don’t always join the energy and water panel for the first pass at NNSA’s budget. This year, they not only showed up, they got dispensation from Chairwoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) to question the witnesses early.
After the defense funders left the energy and water hearing, Gordon-Hagerty continued to pound the table, figuratively speaking, about the need for the NNSA’s requested funding boost.
“We are seeking to do things in 10 years that traditionally would take 15 to 20 because we work in the nuclear weapons complex,” Gordon-Hagerty said in the Wednesday appropriations hearing. “That is not building homes, with all due respect, that is building nuclear-grade facilities.”
NNSA’s request for construction funding for 2021 includes $2.5 billion within the Production Infrastructure and Infrastructure and Operations accounts: almost $1.5 billion more than appropriated for 2020. The former account includes work on planned plutonium pit factories at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina., the latter includes the Uranium Processing Facility under construction at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., plus planned lithium and tritium facilities.
“[W]e realized that after decades of neglect of our enterprise, it was time that we received the necessary, the critical resources to upgrade our infrastructure and modernize our entire nuclear enterprise,” Gordon-Hagerty said.
Republicans at the hearing, like Calvert and subcommittee chair Ranking Member Mike Simpson (D-Idaho) nodded along to that line, allowing that civilian nuclear weapons production facilities were allowed to atrophy after the end of the Cold War, and following a decade (and more) of counterterrorism wars that pushed nuclear weapons to the periphery.
But no GOP member in the appropriations hearing offered the unequivocal endorsement that Turner did during Armed Services hearings this week. Meanwhile Kaptur completely shredded the request, essentially promising Gordon-Hagerty that the House would not grant it.
