WASHINGTON — The first draft of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s 2025 budget passed the House Appropriations Committee Tuesday on a largely party line vote and one new directive about nuclear nonproliferation in Eastern Europe.
The committee passed the bill 30-26, which if made law would provide some $25.5 billion to the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2025, about 2% higher than the White House requested and roughly 5.5% higher than the 2024 budget.
In a noncontroversial manager’s amendment agreed to by a voice vote, chairman Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) requested a paragraph be added to the bill’s detailed report to explain the committee’s preferences for spending Nuclear Smuggling and Detection Deterrence (NSDD) funds to combat “volatility and instability in Eastern Europe.”
“The Committee supports the NSDD program’s efforts to deploy modern and appropriate equipment to detect nuclear threats and encourages the utilization of ruggedized equipment that is most suitable and sustainable for the environment in which our partner countries operate,” reads a copy of the amendment posted Tuesday on the website X.
The amendment did not explicitly mention besieged Ukraine, where the invading Russian military has taken control of a nuclear power plant.
The full House had not scheduled a vote on the bill as of Tuesday evening. Fiscal year 2025 begins Oct. 1.
Among other things, the legislation would increase funding, relative to the White House’s request, for the Uranium Processing Facility in Fleischmann’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., district, and for a planned plutonium pit factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which was supposed to begin producing this spring W87-1 pits for future silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles.