The House Armed Services Committee plans to start marking up the fiscal 2019 defense authorization bill, which will include policies for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), in late April.
All six of the Armed Services subcommittees are scheduled to conduct their markups on April 26, the committee said. That includes the strategic forces subcommittee with jurisdiction over the nuclear-weapon programs managed by the NNSA. The full committee will mark up the bill May 9.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has not yet announced its markup schedule.
Just about any NNSA issue could be legislated during these markups, among which are: whether to shut down the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.; and whether to manufacture nuclear-weapon cores known as plutonium pits somewhere other than the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The 2018 defense authorization bill said the NNSA should keep MFFF —a facility designed to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium — open, unless the agency can prove an alternative means of plutonium disposal is cheaper. The Department of Energy agency still wants to end the project and is actively working on the cancellation paperwork Congress ordered up last year.
The 2018 bill also said the NNSA should update Congress by May 11 — after the House’s scheduled markup this year —about whether the agency really intends to move some production of plutonium pits to South Carolina from New Mexico.
The National Defense Authorization Act is one of the few bills that reliably passes Congress each year with bipartisan support. The enormous scope of the bill, and the urgency to pass it, means the measure sometimes takes a long time to make it to the president’s desk. The 2018 act, which set policy from October 2017 to September 2018, was not signed until December 2017.
