Two of the Senate’s reliable nuclear skeptics last week asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the budget increase the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is seeking for the 2021 fiscal year.
Among other things, the GAO should determine why the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency’s Weapons Activities budget needs a much greater increase than forecast only a year ago, according to a letter Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) sent on Feb. 27 to Comptroller General Gene Dodaro.
Feinstein and Markey also asked the GAO to investigate whether the NNSA has considered delaying or terminating any nuclear-weapon modernization programs, and whether the agency’s assumptions about its future funding needs will change if the New START nuclear-arms-limiting treaty between the U.S. and Russia expires in February 2021.
Markey is a staunch disarmament advocate who has supported multiple bills to outlaw any nuclear first strikes by the United States. Feinstein is the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, where she enjoys an outwardly cordial, and long-running, professional relationship with panel Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).
The subcommittee writes the first draft of the Senate’s annual budget bill for the NNSA, the Department of Energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The NNSA has requested a nearly $20 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1: roughly 20% above the $16.7 billion enacted for the current budget. The spending proposal also is nearly $3 billion more than the agency forecast, in its 2020 budget request last year, that it would need for 2021.
Almost the entire requested increase would go straight into projects to rebuild nuclear weapons production capability and weapons life-extension programs. NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty testified this week before House appropriators that the agency conducted a nationwide review last year that uncovered a need for much more funding than expected.
Powerful lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Senate already support the proposed NNSA budget increase. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was among the Republican lawmakers who in a January Oval Office meeting pressed President Donald Trump to request the $20-billion NNSA budget, rather than a roughly $17.5 billion budget suggested by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Trump subsequently approved the larger NNSA budget, which Democrats in the House Armed Services and Appropriations committees questioned — pointedly — in hearings this week.
