The House Rules Committee late Tuesday approved floor debate for 11 nuclear-related amendments to the lower chamber’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2020.
The committee is scheduled to meet again today at 3 p.m. Eastern time, so further nuclear amendments — lawmakers proposed some 25 for the House NDAA — could still be approved for the floor. Full debate would then begin Thursday.
The House’s version of the NDAA, which sets spending limits and policy for defense programs, faces a tough floor vote this week. Republicans have all but guaranteed they will not vote for the $730 billion measure, which is about $20 billion below the amount requested by the White House and the spending cap set in the Senate NDAA. Meanwhile, left-leaning Democrats are demanding even lower defense spending overall and language to prevent military action in Iran and the Middle East without explicit congressional permission.
Major among the amendments that made the floor cut, for those who watch the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, is a proposal from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.). Smith’s amendment would essentially give the governor of Washington state the authority to veto any DOE reclassification of high-level nuclear waste in that state as lower-level nuclear waste.
The Energy Department in June determined it has the legal authority to treat certain high-level waste as lower-level waste, saying the definition should hinge on the contents of the waste, rather than the process that created the waste or the waste’s place of origin. Smith’s home state, although not his congressional district, includes the shuttered Cold War-era plutonium production facilities at the Hanford Site.
For active nuclear weapons programs managed by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA), Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and John Garamendi (D-Calif.) softened an amendment that would have authorized $185 million less funding than requested for the W80-4 warhad life-extension program. The W80-4, to be a modified W80-1 cruise-missile warhead, is slated for use on the Pentagon’s planned Long-Range Standoff weapon in 2025.
Rather than knocking W80-4 down to $714 million in authorized funding, as they proposed last week, Garamendi and Blumenauer now demand that funding be restricted to that amount until Congress receives an independent study into what they characterized “the unexpected cost increase” for the W80-4 program since 2018. Last year, the NNSA estimated the weapon would need $714 million for the 2020 fiscal year that starts Oct 1. This year, without explaining exactly why, the agency said W80-4 will need nearly $900 million.
The full list of amendments approved so far for floor debate is online here.
The White House on Tuesday threatened to veto the House NDAA over a long list of measures, including reduced caps on spending for certain nuclear-weapon programs.
The Senate has already passed its version of the NDAA, which fully funds all DOE and Pentagon nuclear-modernization programs. That bill authorizes $16.5 billion for the NNSA and about $5.5 billion for defense environmental cleanup at the Environmental Management office. The House bill has a little under $16 billion for the NNSA and about $5.5 billion for Environmental Management.
