A 2020 appropriations package passed by Congress this week would fully fund the next generation of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, along with the civilian-operated infrastructure that makes their warheads.
Gone from the 2020 budget are nearly all the restrictions House Democrats wanted to put on the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) procurement, and supporting infrastructure and warhead programs managed by the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Instead, the bill creates only one funding gate on the NNSA end: It would block a quarter of the roughly $110 million budget for the GBSD warhead, W87-1, until the civilian agency starts providing quarterly progress reports about the weapon.
President Donald Trump was slated to sign the bill, along with others necessary to get the defense-nuclear funding taps flowing at DOE and the Pentagon, on Friday, after deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Under the permanent 2020 budget, the GBSD itself would get a little more than $555 million at the Pentagon, mostly for continuing technology development by Northrop Grumman: now the only company bidding to build the missile. That is only 2% lower than the requested level because Boeing dropped out of the competition to build the solid-fueled missiles and the Air Force will no longer pay out the company’s GBSD technology development contract. The three-year pact, awarded in 2017, would have been worth $100 million in 2020, according to an explanatory statement appended to the latest DOD spending bill.
House Democrats proposed giving GBSD itself 80% of the $570 million requested. The House also wanted to give the NNSA only half the $110 million or so requested for the GBSD warhead, and only two-thirds of what the NNSA sought for pit infrastructure. The GOP-controlled Senate proposed the requested level of funding, or more, for these programs, in a bill that never got a floor vote.
Congress this week gave its final approval to a slate of defense spending measures, including a defense- and non-defense spending package, and the National Defense Authorization Act that allows for the expenditure of defense funding provided under those bills. The defense spending bill funds GBSD and other Pentagon programs, while the non-defense bill, despite its name, funds the NNSA’s defense-nuclear programs. Since Oct. 1, continuing resolutions have funded agencies including the NNSA at 2019 levels.
Last week, Northrop Grumman confirmed it has bid on a contract to build and deploy GBSD. The Air Force expects to award a contract next summer. Boeing, which could still protest the bid or award, confirmed it did not bid, saying through a spokesperson that it “continues to support a change in acquisition strategy that would bring the best of industry to this national priority and demonstrate value for the American taxpayer.”
Once Trump signs the spending measures on Friday, the NNSA would get $710 million for its Plutonium Sustainment account in 2020. That would fully fund the agency’s plan to design and build two factories capable of producing fissile warhead cores, or plutonium pits, for the GBSD. The two factories would notionally produce 80 pits annually by 2030, starting at 10 in 2024. The 2020 budget funds design and construction at Los Alamos, and mostly design work in South Carolina at the Savannah River Site.
The NNSA plans to split the pit work between the planned factories, with the South Carolina plant getting the lion’s share by 2030. The agency has acknowledged it will be a “challenged” to hit that level of throughput by then. The House, particularly skeptical of NNSA’s plans and seeking to slow the overall GBSD program in order to free up funding for modernization of conventional weapons, wanted to hold Plutonium Sustainment funding at around $470 million: nearly 35% below the request.
In a nod to House Democrats’ concerns about the intercontinental ballistic missile modernization writ large, the 2020 spending bill’s report would gate 25% of the W87-1 budget until the NNSA files quarterly progress reports with Congress about the weapon and its pits. Among other things, these reports would have to address any foreseeable delays to the program, including those associated with building pit infrastructure, or pits themselves.
The Air Force plans to replace 400 Minuteman III silo-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles with GBSD missiles beginning around 2030. The service will procure more than 600 GBSD missiles to provide emergency spares and some extras to test-fly.
The NNSA’s planned pit complex could, in theory, produce enough pits by the mid-2030s to provide one W87-1 warhead for every GBSD missile the Air Force plans to procure.
