Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was sworn in as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Thursday, officially putting the former National Security Council and Energy Department staffer in charge of a roughly $13-billion nuclear-weapons budget that is only set to grow.
The NNSA announced the swearing-in Thursday in a press release. The Senate confirmed Gordon-Hagerty to lead the semiautonomous Department of Energy (DOE) weapons agency on Feb. 12, one month and 28 days after President Donald Trump nominated her.
Gordon-Hagerty is the first woman to lead the NNSA in its nearly 20-year history. She was sworn in one year, one month, and two days into the Trump administration. No president has ever switched NNSA administrators so quickly. Frank Klotz, Gordon-Hagerty’s predecessor, left the agency Jan. 19, a year after Inauguration Day. Steven Erhart was acting NNSA administrator for about a month.
Gordon-Hagerty has said her first priority as administrator will be readying the agency to annually produce 80 nuclear-weapon- cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which runs the only pit-plant in the nation, is set to begin that mission in 2026, when it is scheduled to crank out 30 pits a year. The lab has not produced a war-ready pit since 2011.
The NNSA is looking at supplementing Los Alamos’ output with a new pit facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The Savannah River plant could be the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility now under construction at the site for a different NNSA mission. The agency is studying whether it can convert the facility to produce pits instead of dispose of plutonium, as currently planned under a nonproliferation mission DOE wants to carry out with separate, currently unfunded additions to existing Savannah River infrastructure.
Gordon-Hagerty now embarks on her third stint in the executive branch. She previously served five years in the the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as the National Security Council’s director for combating terrorism. Prior to that, she spent six years at DOE, where she led the agency’s Office of Emergency Response and Office of Weapons Surety. Gordon-Hagerty also served as a congressional staffer and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
If Congress grants the Trump administration’s budget request for what would be Gordon-Hagerty’s first full fiscal year as administrator, the NNSA would grow about 16 percent year over year to a roughly $15 billion agency. The increase would speed up the agency’s four existing nuclear-weapon modernization programs, on which the agency now spends about $1 billion a year.
It might also pay for early work on a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead proposed Feb. 2 in the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. In a Wednesday question-and-answer session at the annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Alexandria, Va., Erhart would not rule out the possibility of starting work on the warhead in the next fiscal year.
