The House Rules Committee will craft the rules of debate for the chamber’s fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act beginning Monday, and already members have proposed several amendments related to Department of Energy nuclear programs.
One proposed amendment, from Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), would entirely strip out $65 million the House Armed Services Committee authorized for the new low-yield, submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warhead called for in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. The money would then have to be used for deficit reduction.
Another, from Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), would authorize only half the total recommended by the committee and withhold the other half until after after the Department of Defense reports to Congress about the weapon’s effect on global stability. Some Democrats in Congress worry the low-yield warhead will precipitate an arms race with other nuclear powers such as Russia, and lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons at all.
The Energy Department has said it will modify some existing W76 warheads, used on Trident II D5 missiles carried aboard Ohio-class submarines, to create the new low-yield weapon. The agency wants to use personnel and equipment already ramped up as part of the ongoing W76 life-extension program, which is scheduled to wrap up in fiscal 2019.
Meanwhile, Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) proposed a pair of amendments that would ratchet up oversight of DOE’s plutonium pit program.
The Energy Department is gearing up to annually produce at least 80 plutonium pits, fissile nuclear-warhead cores, by 2030 for the 30-year, $1-trillion-plus nuclear modernization program started by the Barack Obama administration.
Last week, DOE announced it planned to produce 30 of these pits at Los Alamos and 50 at a repurposed plutonium-disposal plant under construction at the agency’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Luján opposes moving any part of the pit mission away from Los Alamos.
One of Luján’s proposed amendments would require the comptroller general to review the engineering analysis DOE relied on to justify the two-pronged pit plan. The second, co-sponsored by Reps. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) and Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), would require a federally funded research and development center to assess DOE’s future plutonium plans, and require the secretive Nuclear Weapons Council to provide annual certifications about these plans.
The Rules Committee is scheduled Monday and Tuesday to set the terms of the floor debate, including which of the hundreds of proposed amendments to the NDAA will make it that far. Afterward, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will set a date for the debate itself.
The House Armed Services Committee approved its version of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act last week along party lines. The Senate Armed Services Committee is set to mark up its version of the annual defense policy bill next week in a series of closed sessions.
