Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), whose Nashville, Tenn.-centered congressional district is more than 100 miles from the nearest nuclear security site, will lead the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee that sets policy for Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) will be the ranking member on the subcommittee, which writes the parts of the annual National Defense Authorization Act that concern the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its $15 billion worth of annual nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs.
That will make Cooper the conduit for House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith’s (D-Wash.) plan to cancel the low-yield W76-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead Congress approved last year. The weapon would be a modified version of the W76-1 warhead that recently completed its life-extension program.
Smith announced Cooper and Turner’s appointments in a press release. Smith, who has sponsored legislation to kill the planned low-yield warhead, has targeted the U.S. nuclear arsenal broadly, vowing also to take a hard look at the Pentagon’s planned orders of new intercontinental ballistic missiles known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent.
Authorization committees set policy and spending limits for defense agencies, including the NNSA. Appropriations committees actually provide funding bills.
With Wednesday’s announcement, the NNSA now knows exactly who its congressional overseers are in the 116th Congress, in which Democrats control the House and Republicans control the Senate. The Senate Armed Services Committee announced last week that Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) would chair the panel’s strategic forces subcommittee.
Meanwhile, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) will chair the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee that writes the NNSA’s annual appropriations bill. On the other side of the Hill, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), friend of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Uranium Processing Facility under construction there, will again handle the gavel on the Senate appropriations energy and water subcommittee. Alexander will retire when his term expires in January 2021.
