A proposed nuclear weapons budget due for a committee vote in the House of Representatives today would tap the brakes forcefully on the next intercontinental ballistic missile warhead and sharply curtail another pair of nuclear weapons programs.
That is according to a detailed bill report released Monday by the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee. The panel has recommended about $16 billion in funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) 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. The full House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up the bill starting at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday.
In the bill report, the subcommittee recommended a combined $524 million, or $300 million less than requested for 2020, for development of future W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) warheads and the specialized facilities that will produce the fissile cores ― or pits ― of those silo-based weapons.
The subcommittee proposed that level of funding as House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) seeks to slow the Pentagon’s procurement of Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles slated to replace the U.S. fleet of 400 1970s-vintage Minuteman III missiles starting around 2030.
At the same time, the subcommittee 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 but did not boost B83 sustainment to levels sought by the administration. The NNSA plans to deliver the first W76-2 low-yield warhead to the Navy by Sept. 30.
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.
