The House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday voted to keep legally binding pit-production dates that the National Nuclear Security Administration does not believe it will meet.
It was one of the few debates about nuclear weapons during Wednesday’s 12-hour markup of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which the committee passed by 57-1 at about 10:15 p.m. Eastern time. The bill would cap spending at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at $29.95 billion for the first year that starts Oct. 1.
The proposal to repeal the six year-old pit-production deadlines came from Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.). It was one of three nuclear-weapons amendments he offered during committee debate of the full NDAA. In a familiar development for Garamendi, the committee rejected all three.
Under deadlines from 2018, the NNSA must make 30 pits annually at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico by 2026 and 50 annually at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., by 2030. The agency has acknowledged multiple times that those deadlines will come and go without the legally required throughput. Los Alamos now says it will ramp up to 30 pits in 2028.
Meanwhile, the committee also voted down Garamendi amendments that would have lowered the number of silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles the Air Force is allowed to deploy and paused development of the budget busting Sentinel, the next-generation, silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile.
“Sadly, it appears that none of our [House Armed Services Committee] GOP colleagues care about wasteful & dangerous nuclear spending in this year’s NDAA,” Garamendi wrote in a message on the website X, around the time the markup ended.
Some time next decade, Sentinel will begin deploying with a W87-1 warhead tip. Each of these weapons will contain one freshly cast pit from Los Alamos.
A scheduled speaker at next week’s annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, Garamendi has remained one of the few lawmakers in his party who believe the current nuclear modernization program, started by President Barack Obama’s (D) administration in 2016, should be slowed down.
For years, Garamendi has reliably introduced amendments to curb Sentinel’s development and for years his colleagues on both sides of the aisle have reliably opposed them.
Even with Sentinel over budget, behind schedule and undergoing a congressionally mandated Nunn-McCurdy review by the Air Force, Garamendi could not stop the momentum this year. The House Armed Services Committee did adopt a few uncontroversial amendments designed to ratchet up congressional oversight of the missile, but no amendments to curb its development or deployment.
