The head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the secretary of energy are reportedly at odds over the weapons agency’s 2021 budget request, which would be at least $17.5 billion and perhaps as high as $20 billion for the coming fiscal year, a new digital publication reported this week.
The Dispatch, a website founded by conservative commentators Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, reported Friday that President Donald Trump is inclined request $20 billion for fiscal year 2021, instead of $17.5 billion, as recommended by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty turned in the $20-billion request last fall, The Dispatch reported earlier in the week. The budget office nixed her proposal, eventually whittling it down to $17.5 billion.
That prompted Gordon-Hagerty to fire off an 11-page memo to her new boss, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, asking that he use his influence as a member of Trump’s Cabinet to secure $20 billion for the NNSA. The Dispatch said it obtained that memo.
Brouillette refused, according to the report, and told the NNSA chief to be content with the lower figure: a level of funding Gordon-Hagerty said would prevent the semiautonomous DOE branch from meeting the goals set out in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. Those include annual production by 2030 of 80 fissile nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium pits.
A budget of $17.5 billion would “not meet the commitments of the policies set forth in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, 2017 National Security Strategy and Nuclear Weapons Council requirements,” Gordon-Hagerty reportedly wrote in the memo to Brouillette. “At this level of funding, NNSA will need to reduce the size and composition of the stockpile almost immediately.”
The Dispatch articles appeared less than a month before the scheduled Feb. 10 release of the Trump administration’s official budget request for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The NNSA’s 2020 budget is more than $16.5 billion, almost a 10% increase from the 2019 appropriation. A bump to $20 billion would be a 20% increase on top of that.
Even $17.5 billion is far more than the NNSA thought, only as recently as last year, that it would need for 2021. In the the Future-Years Nuclear Security Program line in the agency’s 2020 budget request, the agency forecast it would need just under $17 billion, or half a billion dollars less than the 2021 ask Brouillete and the budget office reportedly backed.
A spokesperson for House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who last year tried to slash nuclear weapons spending at the NNSA and the Pentagon, said the “interagency rift” boded ill for the 2021 defense authorization process.
“Chairman Smith continues to have concerns about the escalating costs and affordability of the Administration’s proposed nuclear modernization plan,” the spokesperson wrote Friday in an email. “This latest interagency rift about about adding billions of dollars in unplanned costs at this early stage does not bode well for the executability and feasibility of the trillion dollar nuclear modernization and sustainment program without prioritization.”
Asked to confirm whether Gordon-Hagerty had told Brouillette that the rumored 2021 budget request would not support key nuclear modernization programs from the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, an NNSA spokesperson deferred to a Department of Energy spokesperson. The DOE spokesperson did not reply to the request for comment.
The NNSA spokesperson also did not respond to a request for comment about whether the recently approved 2020 budget allowed the agency to meet the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review’s goals.
According to The Dispatch, Trump endorsed $20 billion for the NNSA in 2021 after a Thursday meeting with a group of Republicans from the House and the Senate. Among those who requested a briefing were Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), The Dispatch reported. Their offices did not reply to requests for comment this week.
The Dispatch reported that Brouillette and Mick Mulvanney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, were at the Thursday meeting. Gordon-Hagerty was not at the meeting, The Dispatch said.
Smith’s office did not reply to a query about whether he had requested, or even wanted, a meeting about the proposed NNSA budget.
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review added a few objectives to the broader, 30-year nuclear modernization program the Barack Obama administration approved in 2016. The review included a requirement that the NNSA produce at least 80 pits a year by 2030. Previously, 80 pits by 2030 was a flex goal for the agency.
The Trump administration also ordered the NNSA to produce a new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, which the agency did. In 2019, Gordon-Hagerty said during a Washington breakfast last week, the NNSA finished making the low-yield W76-2 warhead: a modification of the recently refurbished W76-1 warhead. The agency got a total of $75 million between 2019 and 2020 to build the warhead and deliver it to the Navy.
The Nuclear Posture Review further required the NNSA to study the possibility of building a nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile: something for which Congress carved $5 million out of the agency’s W80-4 cruise missile warhead refurbishment budget to do this year.
Finally, the 2018 document asked the NNSA to keep the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb in war-ready shape until the agency finishes refurbishing the B61-12 gravity bomb some time this decade. The Obama administration had ordered the NNSA to permanently retire the B83.
