A 2021 spending bill the House Appropriations Committee passed this week would prohibit development of a proposed new nuclear warhead for the Navy while upping investments in infrastructure to produce new plutonium triggers — but not by as much as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wants.
That is according to a detailed bill report for the 2021 energy and water development legislation passed last week by the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee. The full committee approved the bill Monday on a 30-21 partisan line vote. A House aide said the bill should make it to the House floor the week of July 27. The Senate Appropriations Committee had not unveiled its preferred NNSA budget at deadline Friday.
The House committee’s report for the $49.6 million bill specifies that the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon agency should not get any of the $53 million it sought for the proposed W93 submarine launched ballistic missile warhead. It should also focus near-term efforts to produce plutonium pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the document says — essentially the same stance majority House Democrats took last year.
Overall, the bill provides about $18 billion for the NNSA: more than $1 billion above the 2020 budget of some $16.7 billion, but nearly $2 billion less than the White House request of almost $20 billion.
According to the report, the NNSA should receive just over $1 billion for its new Primary Capability Modernization account: the category that funds design and construction of plutonium-pit factories at Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. That’s about $600 million below the request, but more than $290 million above the 2020 appropriation.
Relative to the 2020 appropriations, the energy and water subcommittee taps the brakes on spending for the planned Savannah River pit plant while plowing more money into the expansion of Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility. The bill would provide $650 million for Los Alamos Plutonium Modernization: over double the 2020 appropriation, but almost 20% below the request. Year-to-year spending on Savannah River Plutonium Modernization, on the other hand, would fall some 25% to about $305 million, if the bill becomes law. That’s roughly 30% less funding than requested.
The NNSA wants to convert Savannah River’s canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Facility into a new pit plant. Together, the facilities are supposed to produce at least 80 pits a year by 2030, though the NNSA has admitted it will be a challenge to make the deadline. The 2021 budget would pay for some post-critical-decision 1 activities. The NNSA is supposed to hit that milestone, in which it formalizes its design choice for the facility and establishes a cost range, by the end of December.
Most of the $1.7 billion of requested funding that the House Appropriations panel refused to grant the NNSA for fiscal 2021 was for upgrading and building nuclear weapons infrastructure, such as the pit plants. The difference between the agency’s ask for infrastructure and operations funding and the subcommittee’s recommendation was about $1 billion. The lower-than-requested recommendation for plutonium accounts for more than half of that, but other items also come in below the request. The Uranium Processing Facility under construction at the Y-12 National Security Complex, for example, would get $600 million, which is about $150 million less than either the request or the current budget. The facility, to be constructed by 2025, will be the main manufacturing site for nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
On the other hand, essentially all ongoing and planned weapons modernization programs in the Stockpile Major Modernization account would get essentially the requested funding of $2.6 billion, according to the bill report. That is some $500 million more than the 2020 appropriation. The W93 is the only major modernization program the subcommittee was unwilling to fund. The proposed warhead would be a new design based on an explosive package that could be certified without a yield test, the NNSA has said. The warheads would eventually replace both the W88 and W76 variants now used aboard Trident II-D5 missiles carried by Columbia-class submarines, but the details about when the Navy would deploy the weapons have yet to be hashed out. The W93 is the intended tip for whatever missile will succeed Trident II-D5, and that missile has not been designed yet.
The House bill provides more than $13.5 billion for NNSA Weapons Activities, which is $1.3 billion above the 2020 budget but $1.7 billion short of the request. Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation would get almost $2.25 billion, which is over $75 million more than the 2020 budget and nearly $210 more than requested. Naval Reactors would get the requested $1.7 billion or so, or $35 million more than the 2020 appropriation.
Also squeezed into the report, the House Appropriations Committee wants a briefing from the NNSA, no later than 60 days after the already-divisive bill becomes law, about the possibility of delaying production of the W80-4 cruise missile warhead by a year. The NNSA now plans to start producing refurbished warheads in or after fiscal 2025, when it expects to finish the proof-of-concept first production unit of the weapon.
The NNSA’s program-independent Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation has said the agency might be able to postpone the W80-4 first production unit without delaying deployment of the Long-Range Standoff weapon cruise missile — its carrier vehicle — later this decade.
In Monday’s markup, Pentagon-NNSA cooperation was one of the only nuclear weapons issues to which any influential lawmaker devoted substantial speaking time.
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chair of the Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said the spending bill’s prohibtion on the NNSA from using 2021 funding to collaborate with the Nuclear Weapons Council could violate current law that directs the council “to advise both the departments on their respective budgetary needs.”
The House committee’s language about interagency budget dialogue continues a hot debate started in June by the Senate Armed Services Committee about how much more influence the Pentagon should have over the NNSA’s annual budget.
In its 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, the upper chamber’s Armed Services Committee wanted to give the Pentagon conditional veto power over the Energy Department branch’s budget request. However, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) struck that language from the bill with an amendment adopted before the chamber’s two-week July recess. Originally, the bill would have let the joint DOD-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council force the secretary of energy to increase the NNSA budget at the expense of other Energy Department programs.
The Senate is supposed to return to Washington on Monday and resume debate of their National Defense Authorization Act. The House is supposed to start debate on its version next week. An amendment pending to the House bill, from Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) would add the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of Defense to the Nuclear Weapons Council.
In congressional testimony this week, Brouillette said he opposed giving the council any control over the NNSA’s budget. He testified Tuesday, before Walden’s amendment became public. NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said Friday in a statement that the agency too opposes taking control of the agency’s budget away from DOE, but that NNSA does “support joint budget planning, process improvements, and a collaborative approach to strengthen our national defense.”
