WASHINGTON — The leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services committees expect by July 27 to finish final negotiations on the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which would enable the Department of Energy to design a new low-yield nuclear warhead.
That is about two weeks from the day the conferees — members of the House and Senate tasked with reconciling the different versions of the annual military policy bill produced by the two chambers — hunkered down for their first day of negotiations.
The annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) does not set the budget for federal agencies. Rather, it establishes policies and funding ceilings for appropriators write the annual budget bills.
All told, the Senate and House want to authorize more than $15 billion in spending for active nuclear-weapons, nonproliferation, and nuclear-naval programs managed by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The House and Senate each would authorize $65 million in 2019 to begin converting an unspecified number of existing W76 warheads into low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads.
Among the differences the House and Senate must resolve to produce a unified 2019 NDAA:
- Exactly how much protection to afford the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility: an unfinished, over-budget plutonium-disposal plant the NNSA wants to turn into a factory for fissile warhead-cores called plutonium pits. The Senate proposed banning the NNSA from canceling the facility until at least Oct. 1, 2019. The House proposed giving the agency the opportunity to cancel the plant, if it can prove an alternative disposal option is cheaper.
- Whether to require the Government Accountability Office to review the savings achieved by combining the management and operations contract for the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex: DOE’s hub for national-defense uranium programs. The Senate proposed the review in a report appended to its version of the NDAA. The House’s bill report had no such language. Consolidated Nuclear Security, a Bechtel-led team, got the combined contract to manage the two weapons-production sites in 2013. Including options, one of which the NNSA picked up in late March, the deal runs through June 30, 2024.
Last year’s NDAA took about two weeks to unify, but it took more than a month afterward for President Donald Trump to sign the compromise bill into law.
