WASHINGTON — The House Appropriations Committee this week approved legislation that would slow development of next-generation, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, along with Department of Energy infrastructure that supports them.
The next stop for the two bills — which passed essentially along party lines, and without any amendments directly affecting nuclear arms spending — is the House floor. Committee Chair Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) has said she expects the full House to vote on the bills in June.
Together, the fiscal 2020 defense and energy and water development appropriations acts provide around $980 million, or some $410 million less than the Donald Trump administration requested, for development of Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles and DOE plutonium-pit plants needed to make their nuclear warheads.
That is according to detailed bill reports released Monday by the House Appropriations energy and water development and defense subcommittees.
Overall for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the committee recommended roughly $16 billion in funding for fiscal 2020: about 6% higher than the enacted 2019 budget, but about 5% less than what the White House requested for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
For planned W87-1 warheads the specialized facilities that will build the cores, or pits, of those silo-based weapons, the full committee approved a combined $524 million: $300 million less than requested for 2020.
The committee approved $53 million for W87-l itself, which is less than half what the administration requested. For Plutonium Sustainment, the bill payer for planned pit plants in New Mexico and South Carolina, the Committee approved about $470 million, or $240 million less than requested. Both accounts would get more funding than they did for 2019.
The committee bill would not forbid the NNSA from designing a new pit plant for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, but it would force the agency to begin work on that plant with only two-thirds of the funding the White House sought for the Plutonium Sustainment account.
The committee approved these levels of funding as House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) seeks to slow the Pentagon’s procurement of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles slated to replace the U.S. fleet of 400 1970s-vintage Minuteman III missiles starting around 2030.
If the House committee’s proposed ICBM budget became law, the missiles themselves could be delayed “some place between months and years,” Peter Fanta, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said Thursday at a Capitol Hill breakfast hosted by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute.
In the event the GOP-controlled Senate, which does not share the House’s sentiment that the U.S. is replacing its nuclear ICBMs too quickly, accepts the House’s proposed Pentagon budget, the Defense Deparment would find bill payers among its other programs to keep the new ICBM program on schedule, Fanta said. The program’s total cost is projected to rise, according to the Air Force. Previously, the service said the new ICBMs could cost up to $100 billion.
“The first thing we would do is … since this is our No. 1 priority, we would make sure that that program at all costs stays as close to [the request] as we could,” Fanta said.
Senate appropriators have yet to weigh in on the issue, but the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday approved a 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that supports all the funding requested for nuclear modernization programs next fiscal year.
Meanwhile, the latest House Appropriations energy and water bill would provide a combined $40 million less than the NNSA requested for two initiatives started by the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review: building a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead called W76-2, and keeping the B83 megaton-class gravity bomb in war-ready shape into the 2020s.
In a markup last week, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), chair of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, said she would not fund “costly, poorly defined recommendations from the President’s [2018] Nuclear Posture Review.” That turned out to mean zeroing some $10 million requested for W76-2 in 2020, and recommending a B83 maintenance budget of $22 million: around $30 million less than requested and about $12.5 million below the 2019 budget.
The fully GOP-led Congress last year appropriated $65 million for W76-2 for fiscal 2019. The administration did not request the boost for B83 sustainment until this year. The NNSA plans to deliver the first of a “small number” of W76-2 low-yield warhead to the Navy by Sept. 30, the agency has said.
The committee bill also nixes an NNSA request for study money for a future low-yield, sea-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review asked NNSA to study the weapon. The NNSA sought the study money as part of a $5.5 million increase for the W80 warhead’s maintenance budget. W80 is the warhead that will be used on the air-launched Long Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile the pentagon plans to deploy beginning in 2025 or so.
On the other hand, the House Appropriations Committee did give the Navy $5 million to study the future nuclear sea-launched cruise missile.
A day before the full committee marked up the spending bills with nuclear weapons funding, the White House fumed that House appropriators diverted requested funding for active nuclear weapons programs into cleanup of legacy nuclear sites.
The committee’s bill includes about $700 million more than the White requested for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to clean up shuttered nuclear-weapon sites, and roughly $600 million less than requested for the NNSA.
“[T]he bill shifts resources to Environmental Management and reduces funding for nuclear security activities, which jeopardizes critical investments to modernize the nuclear weapons enterprise to strengthen national security,” Russell Vought, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a Monday letter to House Appropriations Committee Chair Lowey.
Below are a few other notable spending decisions in the House Appropriations Committee’s 2020 NNSA spending bill:
- The committee kept year-over-year funding flat for construction of the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The facility, being built by Bechtel National under a subcontract to the Bechtel-led site prime Consolidated Nuclear Security, will shape uranium into the forms required for nuclear weapons and naval reactors. The committee recommended $703 million for construction in fiscal 2020, instead of the $745 million requested.
The office of Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), an appropriator whose district includes Y-12, said he will “continue to work closely with his colleagues in the House and Senate to ensure robust funding for this project [the Uranium Processing Facility] in [fiscal year] 2020.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a stalwart defender of the Uranium Processing Facility, chairs the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
- The committee went along with the NNSA’s proposal to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium by blending it with inert material called stardust at the Savannah River Site, then burying it deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The bill provides nearly $80 million for that so-called dilute-and-dispose effort, known officially as Surplus Plutonium Disposition. Congress did not fund the program in fiscal 2019.
- The committee approved slightly more funding for NNSA Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation than the White House requested: about $2 billion instead of $1.9 billion or so. The biggest winner there was the Global Materials Security account, which includes funding to keep radioactive materials out of the hands of potential bad actors. The account would get $520 million if the committee’s bill becomes law, instead of the $495 million requested.
Click here to view the ExchangeMonitor’s 2020 Budget Tracker for the NNSA, which contains line-by-line comparisons of proposed, requested and enacted budgets for the agency’s nuclear weapons and non-proliferation programs. Click here to download the budget tracker from Google Drive as a PDF or spreadsheet file.
