The House of Representatives’ fiscal 2020 Energy and Water appropriations bill that contains the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget will include about 4% more funding than the enacted 2019 bill did, according to spending limits published this week by the House Appropriations Committee.
The total allocation for the 2020 Energy and Water Development appropriations bill, which funds DOE and other federal agencies, will be just under $46.5 billion, compared with slightly more than $44.5 billion for the current fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
The Energy Department accounts for most of the annual energy and water development appropriations bill. Besides the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) weapons and nonproliferation budget, DOE’s budget funds legacy nuclear-weapons cleanup and civilian nuclear waste projects, among other things. In 2019, DOE’s roughly $34.5-billion budget was more than 75% of the total bill, by funding.
The Appropriations energy and water subcommittee allocation does not specify how much money appropriators will propose spending in 2020 for the NNSA. The subcommittee will decide funding levels in a markup that had yet to be scheduled at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The Donald Trump administration requested that Congress cut DOE’s 2020 budget by about 10% from the current enacted level, to roughly $31.5 million. The White House’s 2020 budget slashed certain discretionary spending programs — the category that includes all federal programs except mandatory social safety nets — to keep their budgets level with spending limits that apply to the next fiscal year’s budget.
But the White House sought no budget cut for the NNSA. The administration seeks $16.5 billion for the semiautonomous DOE branch, up more than 8% from the 2019 budget. The NNSA’s proposed budget accounts for more than half of the White House’s planned spending for the Energy Department.
The largest proposed increase within the NNSA is for the active nuclear weapons programs — including life-extensions, major alterations, and stockpile stewardship maintenance — book kept in the Weapons Activities account. There, the White House seeks about $12.5 billion, or about 12% more than the roughly $11 billion appropriated for 2019.
Within Weapons Activities, the largest proposed increase is for the W80-4 life extension program, which will refurbish the W80 cruise missile warhead for use with the Pentagon’s planned Long-Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile beginning around 2025. The NNSA seeks nearly $900 million for W80-4: more than 35% above the 2019 appropriation and around 25% more than what the agency thought it would need for W80-4 this year.
Meanwhile, the NNSA disclosed this week that it expects delays in delivering the first B61-12 gravity bomb to the Air Force and the first W88 Alt 370 submarine warhead to the Navy.
The delays stem from bad capacitors procured by the Kansas City National Security Campus, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said this week. The agency had not publicly announced the problem with the capacitors when House and Senate Appropriations committees held the agency’s annual budget hearings earlier this year.
