Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
7/31/2015
Ten-year nuclear modernization budget estimates submitted in 2014 by the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD), although “generally consistent” with the agencies’ initiatives, omitted $1.6 billion for two DOE activities and lacked transparency in some DOD calculations, according to a Government Accountability Office report released yesterday. In DOE’s 2014 estimate, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “unintentionally” failed to include $1.6 billion in its operation of the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Tritium Readiness program, the report says. “With these budget estimates included, DOE’s estimate is $100.1 [billion], or 1.5 percent higher than what was included in the May 2014 report,” it says.
The audit also found that DOE’s estimate “for the first five years of the cruise missile warhead life extension program is lower than the cost range in DOE’s internal plans.” The program was estimated last year to cost about $475 million, “which is about $225 million less than the $700 million that is needed to support the low point of the program’s internally estimated cost range,” GAO said. The NNSA’s “$3.6 billion deferred maintenance backlog” also fell short of DOE’s “infrastructure investment benchmarks,” according to the report. Of the 3,800 facilities in the nuclear security enterprise, “50 percent are over 40 years old and 12 percent are no longer being used because of their age and poor condition,” the audit notes.
GAO also said it was not able to “fully verify that DOD’s command, control, and communications estimates were consistent with its internal funding plans.” It noted a lack of transparency in DOD’s methodology to develop certain estimates, “even though the Air Force and Navy used different methodologies for estimates of sustaining and modernizing nuclear delivery systems.” The report adds that “DOD’s estimates for nuclear delivery systems increased by about 40 percent from last year’s report, due in part to changes in the methodologies used to develop them, but the report does not provide comparative information about changes in the estimates from those in the 2013 report.”
