“Individuals from the Department of Energy” collaborated with House Democrats to destroy the National Nuclear Security Administration’s autonomy within the DOE, and cut the Pentagon out of civilian nuclear-weapons budget planning entirely, Sen. James Inhofe said Thursday.
“I suppose we should have expected this sort of political maneuvering to continue after what happened earlier this year with the fiscal year 2021 budget request,” Inhofe said, referring the unusually public intra-DOE budget debate of winter 2019-2020, during which President Donald Trump, at the behest of Inhofe and other lawmakers, ditched Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette’s preferred National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) budget request for a larger figure preferred by the NNSA and the Pentagon.
It was the second time this year that Inhofe has used his gavel to pound DOE officials who, according to the octogenarian Armed Services leader, have worked “behind the scenes” to subordinate the NNSA administrator and military needs to the secretary of energy.
Inhofe’s press office would not identify by name the “individuals” who have so aroused the Senator’s ire.
“The Senator provided as much fidelity as he wanted during today’s hearing,” a Senate Armed Services aide wrote in response to queries from Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The fight over who gets primacy in the DOE budget is at least in part a proxy war between competing stakeholders who either prefer funding active nuclear weapons programs managed by the NNSA, or funding cleanup of shuttered Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear weapons production sites. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management leads that cleanup.
Both parts of DOE rely on defense funding, so budget-makers in Congress and the White House will often increase funding for one at the expense of the other.
The fruits of the DOE-Democrat collaboration Inhofe alleged Thursday are the lower chamber’s 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, and the House’s 2021 minibus appropriations bill. Together, the measures passed this summer would prohibit the NNSA from using its 2021 budget to collaborate with the Defense Department about nuclear weapons acquisition funding, and instill the secretary of energy and the secretary of defense on the Nuclear Weapons Council — the joint DOE-Pentagon body that coordinates U.S. nuclear weapons procurement.
Under current law, the NNSA administrator represents the DOE on the council, and the undersecretary for defense and acquisition and sustainment represents the office of the secretary of defense.
The House’s legislation was a reaction to a provision the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote into its own version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization earlier this summer.
After the winter’s budget drama, the upper chamber’s Armed Services Committee, by a 25-2 vote, approved an authorization act that would have given the Nuclear Weapons Council a sort of veto power over the secretary of energy’s budget request for the NNSA each year.
In Thursday’s hearing, Inhofe called that a “common-sense” bit of legislating that helps DOE and the Pentagon coordinate on nuclear weapons programs. Inhofe said the lopsided Committee vote in favor of the bill proved the proposed reforms “were, and should remain, uncontroversial.”
Inhofe’s colleagues in the upper chamber didn’t agree.
After complaints by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), whose state includes the largest nuclear-weapons cleanup in the country, the Senate voted by voice July 2 to strip the Nuclear Weapons Council’s ability to dictate NNSA spending from the draft National Defense Authorization Act. The secretary of energy still would have to relay the council’s preferences about the NNSA budget to the White House Office of Management and Budget each year, if the Senate bill became law as written.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was one of three witnesses at Thursday’s hearing. The others were Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, and chair of the Nuclear weapons Council, and Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, whose interservice forces carry nuclear weapons every day. All three are on the Nuclear Weapons Council.
Brouillette was not invited.
Last year, in his first months as DOE secretary after Rick Perry’s departure, Brouillette wanted to request about $17.5 billion for the NNSA in 2021. That’s a billion above the 2020 budget. Gordon-Hagerty argued that this was not enough, backing up her claim with an internal NNSA study the sub-agency conducted on itself last year. That study concluded that existing five-year budget projections for the civilian nuke agency were billions of dollars short of what was actually needed to field modernized versions of air-, land- and sea-based nuclear weapons systems starting in 2030.
Gordon-Hagerty said the agency needed a $19.8 billion request for 2021, and that is what Trump ultimately sent to the Hill. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees each met the request, but the House Appropriations Committee recommended a roughly $18 billion NNSA appropriation.
Meanwhile, amid the intra-DOE strife last year, the Nuclear Weapons Council is getting an early start this year on vetting the NNSA’s 2022 budget request. At Thursday’s hearing, Lord said the NNSA delivered its draft 2022 budget request to the council Sept. 4, and that the council itself met Wednesday to discuss the details.
In addition, Lord said, the council set up “a working group to do a budget deep-dive.” The working group includes “NNSA representation and a variety of DOD representation,” plus the White House Office of Management and budget, said Lord.
