After a truncated hearing season filled with furrowed brows, skepticism, and hawkish posturing about unspent appropriations, the House Armed Services Committee is authorizing even more funding than the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) requested for fiscal year 2021 — and they’re not even cutting a submarine from the Navy to do it.
Committee staff made the stunning disclosures in a briefing Thursday with members of the Capitol Hill press corps. The panel is set to mark up the bill next week on Wednesday and Thursday.
As part of its version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the House Armed Services Committee has authorized the civilian nuclear weapons agency to spend at its requested level roughly $20 billion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, and even to spend $80 million more than requested on nuclear nonproliferation programs.
Although House appropriators have threatened not to follow through and actually provide the requested funding in a spending bill slated for markup July 10, just getting the 2021 request through both the House and Senate Armed Services committees goes down as a coup for NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty.
Gordon-Hagerty championed the roughly 20% annual raise for the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon branch from late last year to just before the COVID-19 lockdown, first going up against Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, who reportedly favored a smaller number, then beating the drum for the money in open forums on Capitol Hill.
The NNSA’s 2021 request gave some nuke wonks sticker shock, coming as it did after the agency predicted last year that it would need a roughly $17 billion budget for the year. As first reported in the conservative publication The Dispatch, Gordon-Hagerty went to the mattresses for the budget just authorized after yearlong internal NNSA study determined its nuclear-arsenal modernization program was underfunded by more than $15 billion from 2020 to 2025.
House authorizers and appropriators said the NNSA had billions of dollars worth of unspent appropriations to spend, but Gordon-Hagerty said this money was already earmarked for ongoing construction projects, and international obligations.
As part of nuclear modernization programs, the NNSA is refurbishing the B-61 nuclear gravity bomb and the W88 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead, along with preparing to refurbish the W87 warhead that will tip the Air Force’s next fleet of silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent.
The civilian agency is also seeking $53 million for early work on the W93 warhead, which will be the first new nuclear warhead designed since the end of the Cold War. The missile tip, to be fitted on the successor to the submarine-launched Trident II-D5 ballistic missile, will be tucked into a brand new Mark 7 aeroshell the Navy will develop.
The NNSA is also working on a pair of plants, one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and one at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to make new plutonium pits: fissile nuclear-weapon cores that trigger the fission chain reaction that provides nukes with their city-destroying explosive power.
The preview of the full committee’s NDAA followed a brief markup by the panel’s strategic forces subcommittee this week. It took only about 15 minutes on Wednesday, without debate or amendments, for the subcommittee to advance its portions of the annual bill that sets spending caps and policy for the Pentagon and the Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs.
Separate appropriations bills, which have not yet been submitted in the House or Senate, provide the actual funding authorized by the NDAA. The House Appropriations Committee is set to mark up its 2021 energy and water act July 10, at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The Senate Appropriations Committee had not announced its markup schedule, at deadline.
The full Senate began procedural voting Thursday that would set up votes on the upper chamber’s NDAA next week.
The House strategic forces panel did release a few noncontroversial NNSA measures this week, as part of a public bill summary. They include:
- Requiring a report by Feb. 1, 2021, about how the agency can monitor its highly specialized nuclear-weapons industrial base, with an initial briefing by Aug. 1 of this year from the NNSA administrator that identifies the resources the agency needs to keep the base in good health. Congress wants the agency to replace a patchwork monitoring regime by “various NNSA programs and contractors” with a headquarters-helmed effort aimed at preventing shortfalls of the specialized components and materials used to build nuclear weapons.
- Demanding also by Aug. 1, 2020, a report on reducing the risks and costs of transitioning the NNSA enterprise from its period of post-Cold War stockpile maintenance to 21st century production of refurbished nuclear weapons as part of the Stockpile Responsiveness program.
- Calling for a Government Accountability Office report about the assistance the NNSA’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation provides to the United Nations’ nuclear safeguards program. The report should touch on “how effective has assistance provided by the Department of Energy, NNSA, and other agencies been in strengthening safeguards approaches, technologies, staff, and other resources, and where are the continuing gaps or issues of concern,” according to a bill summary. The Government Accountability Office would have to brief congressional Armed Services committees on its findings by Jan. 30, 2021.
Democrats and Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee also want the president to get more hands-on practice with nuclear command and control. The bill would require the chief executive, at least once in every four-year term, to participate in a nuclear command-and-control exercise — essentially, a rehearsal of a nuclear-war scenario.
The requirement had bipartisan support, a subcommittee aide told reporters last week.
Aside from that, the bill directs the Department of Defense to compile and publish an open-source report about the nuclear weapons capabilities of Russia, China and North Korea: a requirement subcommittee ranking member Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) inserted into the bill.
“Many times, our debate is hindered because the information that we receive about our adversaries is in a classified manor,” Turner said during the subcommittee markup. “The information about our weapons programs, many times, is not classified. So we’re in a situation where we can’t identify what our adversaries are doing and I think this will be very helpful not only just for our debate, but the global debate of nuclear weapons.”
