On a party line 33-24 vote Friday, the House Appropriations Committee approved a 2022 civilian nuclear weapons budget that includes requested funding for proposed plutonium pit factories but withholds funds for a few smaller nuclear weapons programs.
The full House had not scheduled a vote on the bill at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, but Politico reported this week the bill could hit the floor before August as part of a minibus package with other 2022 spending bills. Of the nine amendments to the energy and water bill debated in Friday’s three-hour markup, none proposed changes for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear weapons programs.
The committee’s proposed NNSA budget of about $20 billion includes the $1.8 billion sought for building plutonium pit production factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in New Mexico. That’s about $350 million more than the 2021 appropriation of just over $1.35 billion.
However, the bill directs the agency not to pursue a W80-4 warhead variant for a proposed low-yield, nuclear-tipped Sea Launched Cruise Missile and denies requested funding for a service life extension for the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb, which the Donald Trump administration in 2018 decided to keep on life support past its previously scheduled retirement.
“The Committee considers these proposed investments premature pending the nuclear posture review,” reads a detailed bill report the committee published Thursday. The Joe Biden administration plans to publish its Nuclear Posture review in January or so, nominally in time for the review’s conclusions about the arsenal and the production complex to seep into the fiscal year 2023 budget request.
Meanwhile, the NNSA budget proposed Friday would keep spending flat on the proposed W93 submarine launched ballistic missile warhead in 2022: $19 million less than requested. The weapon would be the first addition to the arsenal since the end of the Cold War that is not a refurbishment of an already-deployed warhead or bomb. W93’s nuclear explosive package was tested at yield before the current moratorium on yield-producing tests took effect in 1992, NNSA has said.
Overall, the committee’s proposed NNSA budget meets the Biden administration’s request and is about flat compared with the 2021 appropriation. However, it would provide some $450 million fewer in 2022 for NNSA Weapons Activities — the stovepipe with the bread-and-butter life-extension programs and production upgrades — than the Donald Trump administration thought would be needed for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
That “significantly underfunds efforts to modernize our nuclear weapons complex,” Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), the committee’s ranking Republican, said during Friday’s markup.
Republicans, still in the minority in the House, have opposed Democratic spending proposals essentially en bloc in the lower chamber this season.
The NNSA recently acknowledged that while the planned pit plant at Los Alamos should be ready to produce war-usable nuclear-weapon cores by fiscal year 2024, and ramp up to 30 annually by 2026, the pit factory proposed for the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., will not be able to produce the 50 pits annually for which it is responsible until 2032 or 2035 — five years later than federal law requires, in the worst-case scenario.
The delay prompted some table-pounding from the House Appropriations Committee this week in the detailed bill report accompanying the spending bill passed Friday.
In the report, lawmakers demanded that the NNSA deliver to Congress, within 15 days of their bill becoming law, a pair of overdue reports about the agency’s pit plans: an integrated master schedule for the pit complex, and a contingency plan for meeting military pit requirements if the NNSA’s current two-state pit strategy does not pan out.
Congress mandated both reports in the NNSA’s 2021 budget bill, which became law in December. The agency had not delivered either by the time House appropriators put their bill report together.
