Civilian nuclear weapons programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration will almost all get year-over-year raises in excess of what the White House requested under an omnibus 2023 spending proposal poised to become law this week.
The Senate voted 68-to-29 Thursday to adopt the full-year appropriations bill, which then went to the House for a Friday vote. The House had not voted at deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, but it was expected to approve the bill, which President Joe Biden (D) said this week he would sign.
Under the bill, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency would get about $22.2 billion under the bill: some $750 million more than requested and $1.5 billion more than the 2022 appropriation.
Driving the increase in large part, Congress has approved spending some $500 million more than requested on construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina: the larger of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) two planned plutonium pit factories.
The South Carolina pit plant would get $1.2 billion for 2023 under the omnibus, which is $500 million more than requested and $725 million more than the 2022 appropriation. NNSA has told Congress that the plant could open by 2036.
The omnibus also funds two weapon programs the Joe Biden administration wanted to cancel: maintenance of the B83 nuclear gravity bomb and development of a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead.
Through a series of short-term stopgap budgets that expire Friday, agencies have been running on the equivalent of their 2022 budgets since Oct. 1.
