Congress passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act and a short-term spending bill this week, clearing the way for a long-term 2023 appropriations bill that would give Department of Energy nuclear programs budget stability through October.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) just passed tees up the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for a budget of $22.3 billion, nearly $900 million above the request. That’s a few ticks above even the $22.1 billion that the House, in an appropriations package passed this summer, proposed for NNSA in fiscal year 2023.
The NDAA, which sets policy and spending limits for defense programs, was a mixed bag for the Joe Biden administration. In the bill, Congress ignored the White House’s request to cancel development of a sea-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile with a variant of the planned W80-4 warhead but allowed the administration to retire 25% of the B83-1 gravity bombs in the NNSA’s inventory.
The NDAA also revealed, in its joint explanatory statement, that the NNSA believes its planned plutonium pit production plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will not be able to make pits, fissile cores of nuclear-weapon first stages, until about 2036. The agency has said it wanted to produce pits in South Carolina as close to 2030 as possible; 2030 is a legal deadline set by Congress.
Meanwhile, under the stopgap spending bill passed this week, NNSA nuclear-weapons programs will make do through Dec. 23 with the annualized equivalent of $20.66 billion, some $750 million below the 2023 request.
In early December, Jill Hruby, administrator of the NNSA, said the agency will have “a lot of problems” if Congress stretches federal appropriations from 2022 into calendar year 2023.
The Senate on Thursday passed the short-term budget bill in a landslide, 71-19, keeping federal agencies operating through Dec. 23 by extending their budgets from fiscal year 2022, which ended Oct. 1. The chamber passed the NDAA by an even larger margin on Thursday, 83-11. The House passed the continuing resolution on Wednesday and the final NDAA last week.
The continuing resolution that was funding federal agencies before Congress passed the latest stopgap this week was set to expire after Friday.
Now, lawmakers will aim to hash out an omnibus spending bill that will fund agencies through the end of fiscal year 2023. Appropriations committees had not released a final 2023 spending bill as of Friday morning.
