The head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) got some face time this week with a key House appropriator, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who would play a major part in closed-door 2020 budget negotiations later this year.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty visited with Kaptur in the latter’s 9th Congressional District of Ohio. Kaptur is the chair of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, which writes the first draft of the NNSA’s budget each year.
The budget was not the purpose of the visit, however. Officially, the NNSA boss joined the lawmaker to talk job and business opportunities with students and small businesses at the University of Toledo on Monday and Tuesday.
For the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, Kaptur’s subcommittee produced an NNSA budget that fell short of Gordon-Hagerty’s request — about $16 billion instead of $16.5 billion — notably providing less money than sought to expand the NNSA’s plutonium pit-producing infrastructure into South Carolina.
Gordon-Hagerty has made production of pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapons, her top priority as NNSA administrator. Her visit with Kaptur came only days after William Bookless, the No. 2 official at NNSA headquarters, told the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board in Chicago that the agency would be “working closely with the House to try and turn that [proposed House budget] around a bit.”
In the meantime, the NNSA is stuck with its 2019 budget at least through Nov. 21, under a short-term budget extension Congress passed in September to prevent a government shutdown for nearely the first two months of fiscal 2020. At the 2019 level under the stopgap, the agency has an annualized budget that is 10% lower than the 2020 request. Even the House’s proposed budget, which the full chamber approved this summer, would have raised the NNSA budget about 4.5%, year over year.
Congress had to settle on the stopgap, and may have to settle for another, after partisan disagreement over funding President Donald Trump’s proposed southern border wall short-circuited the Senate’s appropriations debate.
The upper chamber’s Appropriations Committee last month approved an NNSA budget of around $17 billion, which would give the agency everything it wants and more for pits and other programs. However, the bill missed its chance for a floor vote amid rancorous disagreement over the wall.
Congress is scheduled to return to Washington next week. Absent a compromise by both sides or a cave by one side on the border wall, lawmakers could have to extend 2019 budgets for the NNSA and other agencies yet again.
