The leader of the National Nuclear Security Administration this week pushed back against a gavel-wielding congressman’s public claim that the semiautonomous agency is increasingly dismissive of the authority for its work held by its parent entity, the Department of Energy.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D.N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committe, made the statement during a subcommittee hearing that was supposed to be about DOE’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In his opening statement, Pallone veered sharply off topic to complain that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was going “rogue” from the secretary of energy.
“[W]e should be strengthening the secretary of energy’s role in managing the nuclear security mission, because the NNSA seems to be going from quasi-independent to completely rogue with each passing year,” said Pallone (D-N.J.), who remotely attended Tuesday’s hearing of the Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette was the only witness.
Pallone was referencing both the intra-agency controversy over the NNSA’s latest budget request — ultimately resolved by President Donald Trump to the NNSA’s general advantage — and a controversial part of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which attempted to give the Pentagon veto power over the NNSA’s annual budget request.
“To clear the record, NNSA continues to work in lockstep with the Department of Energy to develop its budget requests and execute its vital national security missions,” said NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty in an unsolicited statement provided Friday to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor by an agency spokesperson.
In a gesture of solidarity with her boss, Gordon-Hagerty also said “[t]here is no daylight between myself and Secretary Brouillette regarding opposition to proposed legislation that would make the Department of Defense the final arbiter of NNSA’s annual budget, thereby violating the Department’s standing as a distinct and equal Cabinet-level agency.
“We do, however, support joint budget planning, process improvements, and a collaborative approach to strengthen our national defense,” Gordon-Hagerty said.
The Senate Armed Services Committee said in the defense policy bill that giving the joint Pentagon-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council new authority over the NNSA’s budget request would help keep military and civilian nuclear-weapon programs in sync.
But the full Senate didn’t buy that argument and exercised the provision from the committee’s NDAA on July 2 by unanimously approving an amendment from Sens. Marie Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Joe Manchin (D-WVa.). The upper chamber plans to vote on the amended NDAA next week.
“[T]his was a really wrongheaded effort that threatens the important longstanding principle of civilian, not military, control over the nuclear weapons stockpile,” Pallone said of the Senate committee’s bill. “And it also stands to upend other non-nuclear weapons aspects of the DOE budget.”
Cantwell and Machin said essentially the same thing before the Senate left town for the Independence Day holiday. The pair warned that if the Nuclear Weapons Council was allowed to force the secretary of energy to increase the NNSA’s budget request, the money would come at the expense of other DOE programs, including cleanup of legacy nuclear-weapon sites managed by the Office of Environmental Management.
Brouillette, when invited by Pallone to explain why the secretary of energy should not have to yield to the Nuclear Weapons Council’s judgment about the adequacy of the NNSA’s budget, hit some of the same notes that he did in a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee before the holiday: that the original NDAA would have let the Pentagon influence the pace of NNSA nuclear weapons maintenance, but still require the secretary of energy, a member of the President’s Cabinet, to annually certify that U.S. nuclear weapons retain their designed destructive power.
“That certification process is signed at the Cabinet level, and it is important that the secretary of energy see the entire process for the development of the budget, the operations within NNSA, all of the activities that occur within the national weapons labs in order to remain comfortable that that certification is in fact solid,” Brouillette told Pallone.
Pallone’s office did not reply to a request for comment about whether the congressman planned legislation to protect the parts of DOE’s budget within the jurisdiction of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Those include the Office of Nuclear Energy, the Office of Science, and others, but not the greater part of the Office of Environmental Management or the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Armed Services Committee sets policy for the weapons agency, and for most of the programs run by the cleanup office.
The Senate Armed Services Committee proposed rewriting the rules for developing the NNSA’s annual budget request following a contentious winter of interagency funding negotiations. At the end of these, the White House approved the roughly $20 billion 2021 budget request favored by NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, rather than the $17.5 billion budget preferred by Brouillette.
In congressional testimony this spring, Gordon-Hagerty justified her aggressive push for a bigger budget by explaining that the NNSA had discovered looming funding shortfalls for weapon refurbs and infrastructure projects after a yearlong internal study of the current nuclear weapons complex — a study the semiautonomous weapons agency initiated itself.
The House and Senate Armed Services committees have each authorized the NNSA for a $20 billion budget this year. Both chambers plan floor action on their respective defense authorization acts the week of July 20, with the Senate expected to pass its bill first.
The House Appropriations Committee this week approved an $18 billion budget for the NNSA, which now awaits a floor vote anticipated during the week of July 27. Even that is more than $1 billion higher than the 2020 appropriation. The Senate Appropriations Committee had not unveiled a 2020 NNSA spending proposal at deadline.
