About two weeks after they began them, House and Senate members on Monday finished final negotiations on a unified fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which each chamber must now approve before President Donald Trump can sign it into law.
However, lawmakers had not released the full report on the compromise version of the bill at deadline Monday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. That means watchers of the Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex will wait a while longer to discover the fate of some controversial programs.
The House and Senate Armed Services committees announced the end of their bicameral conference late Monday, 12 days after final negotiations on the annual military policy bill began.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tentatively scheduled the compromise legislation for a floor vote as soon as Wednesday. The lower chamber is leaving Washington for a monthlong August recess after Friday. The Senate, which has not scheduled a floor vote for the bill, will take a week off in August before returning to the Capitol.
The summary posted by the House Armed Services Committee Monday night said only that the unified bill authorizes the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to spend $65 million on a new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead in 2019. The weapon will be a modified version of the existing W76 warhead.
The summary did not say whether the bill would bar the NNSA from stopping construction of the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, as the Senate proposed. The summary was also silent on the Senate’s plan to provide the agency with greater autonomy from the secretary of energy — a move the secretary and his boss in the White House oppose.
Overall, the bill authorizes more than $15 billion for the NNSA for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. House appropriators proposed a 2019 NNSA appropriation that is closer to what the compromise NDAA allows than did Senate appropriators, who recommended a little less than $15 billion in 2019 funding.
Congress still has not scheduled final negotiations to produce a compromise 2019 appropriations bill covering NNSA funding.
