On a 30-21 vote, the House Appropriations Committee on Monday approved a 2021 budget of about $18 billion for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) as part of a spending bill now awaiting debate on the House floor.
The majority Democrats voted in favor of the measure, while Republicans on the committee were unanimous in opposition. The panel still must mark up a broad slate of 2021 funding bills this week, and Democratic Party leaders likely will not schedule floor debate on any of them until that work is finishing.
The $49.6 billion energy and water legislation in total would provide $41 billion for the Department of Energy, including nearly $7.5 billion for nuclear cleanup jobs under the Office of Environmental Management.
Committee Democrats powered the bill through the debate without any significant amendments to provisions for the NNSA’s nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs.
If the bill becomes law, NNSA would wind up with $1.3 billion more than its current appropriation of $16.7 billion, but with $2 billion less than the $20 billion it requested. Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) called the bill a responsible investment in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Ranking Republican Kay Granger (R-Texas) said the legislation shortchanges the NNSA by slicing into its planned spending.
The House Appropriations Committees’ 2021 energy and water bill would fund most ongoing and planned NNSA nuclear weapons refurbishments at the requested level. The major difference is that the bill has about $1 billion less than sought for infrastructure projects, such as planned plutonium pit factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The bill also would prohibit funding for yield-producing nuclear explosive tests, ban work on the proposed W93 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead in fiscal 2021, and prohibit the NNSA from collaborating with the joint DOE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council on the civilian agency’s annual budget request.
The provision about the interagency budget dialogue continued a debate started in June by the Senate Armed Services Committee about how much more influence the Pentagon should have over the NNSA’s annual budget. In its 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, the upper chamber’s Armed Services Committee wanted to give the Pentagon conditional veto power over the Energy Department branch’s budget request. However, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) struck that language from the bill with an amendment adopted before the chamber’s two-week July recess.
In Monday’s markup, Pentagon-NNSA cooperation was one of the only nuclear weapons issues to which any influential lawmaker devoted substantial speaking time.
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chair of the Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said the spending bill’s decision to ban the NNSA from using 2021 funding to collaborate with the Nuclear Weapons Council could violate current law that directs the council “to advise both the departments on their respective budgetary needs.”
