On a party-line vote Thursday, the House approved a spending bill that would give the National Nuclear Security Administration the requested $20 billion or so for fiscal year 2022: a budget the Nuclear Weapons Council called “minimally sufficient.”
The budget is part of a seven-bill minibus appropriations package that the White House has said it would sign, despite some concerns with the House’s decision to restrict funding for the W93 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead and the sea-launched variant of the W80-4.
A pair of Republican lawmakers drafted amendments that would have provided the $72 million the White House wanted for the W93, instead of the $52 million the bill would provide, plus $10 million for the sea-launched W80-4: a weapon the bill would zero out. However, the House Rules Committee did not allow those amendments down to the floor for consideration.
That leaves it up to Senate appropriators, who had no published any appropriations bills at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, to either propose the requested funding for the two warheads and set up a showdown in an eventual bicameral budget conference, or go along with their House colleagues, who said the weapons should not get any more money until the Biden administration publishes its nuclear posture review, nominally by January.
Although the White House has signaled Biden would sign the minibus into law, a statement of administration policy this week chastised the House because “provisions of the [minibus] appear to pre-judge the outcome of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) now underway.” The nuclear posture review could call for changes to the U.S. arsenal as part of the Biden administration’s plan “to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the national security strategy.”
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Weapons Council, the joint DOE-Pentagon acquisitions watchdog for nuclear weapons, recently warned Congress that nothing short of the Biden administration’s full request for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would do for fiscal year 2022.
The group, whose sole DOE member is the NNSA administrator, certified in a July 23 letter that the Biden budget was “minimally sufficient” to keep NNSA and Pentagon acquisitions in sync.
Within the roughly $20 billion for the NNSA, the House budget recommends some $14.5 billion for Weapons Activities. That’s even with the request, up nearly $140 million year-over-year, but about $450 million less than what the Donald Trump administration thought would be necessary for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, even after factoring in planned spending decreases on major projects such as the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The House budget would fund all of the NNSA’s ongoing warhead and bomb life-extension programs at the requested level, and provide the requested funding for planned plutonium pit factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The NNSA acknowledged this spring that the Savannah River Site would not be ready to come online and produce 50 pits annually in 2030 as hoped — 2032 or 2035 is more like it, the agency said — but that the Los Alamos facility should be ready to cast 30 pits a year starting in 2026, and a smaller number before that.
At Savannah River, a critical decision 1 review approved in July determined “that it would take longer than early preliminary estimates to a) order and receive the equipment and construction materials provided by external vendors necessary for construction; b) execute construction; and c) demonstrate war reserve and full rate plutonium pit production,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote last week in an email.
