The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) program to keep nuclear and radiological materials out of the hands of bad actors would be funded at or above the requested level for the fifth year in a row, if a fiscal 2020 spending bill the House Appropriations Committee passed last week becomes law.
The spike in funding, if enshrined in law, would not be dramatic: about 7% more than the White House request, or almost $2 billion. The account has surfed between $1 billion and $2 billion annually for the past 15 years, previous spending bills show.
This year, House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chair Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) went to bat for the nonproliferation account, for which the Donald Trump administration had actually proposed a modest 3% increase. That was too modest for Kaptur, who pointed out that the White House’s preferred NNSA nonproliferation budget would cut the Global Material Security account from the current enacted level — almost 16% to about $405 million.
Kaptur repeated that observation during a full committee markup last week, where panel Chair Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and all her Democratic colleagues voted to move the energy funding bill to the House floor.
That vote, in a theatrical bit of quintessentially Washingtonian paradox, happened right around the same time that some of the highest-ranking officials in the U.S. nuclear security enterprise had gathered just across the street and down the road to celebrate one of the NNSA programs the White House’s budget would have snipped: Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence.
That program, once called the Second Line of Defense, grew out of the sort of nonproliferation activities that predate the roughly 20 year-old NNSA bureaucracy: stopping Soviet-made nuclear technology and materials from spreading like dandelion seeds after the end of the Cold War.
Kaptur was scheduled to speak at that event, but had to skip it in order to approve a budget that recommended almost $160 million for Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence in 2020: around 10% more than the $140 million recommended by the White House. That proposal would represent a roughly 8% year-over-year cut from about $150 million in 2019.
Kaptur was one of three House members due to appear at the nuclear-star-studded nonproliferation event, which the highest levels of politically appointed managers from NNSA headquarters attended, alongside the directors of the Los Alamos, Sandia, and other national laboratories.
Of the elected VIPs invited, just one showed: Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), whose district covers the Argonne National Laboratory, and who is the only Ph.D. physicist serving in the 116th Congress.
“In the more than 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has transitioned into a different kind of nuclear age: one where rogue regimes and clandestine organizations exhibit the ambition to acquire nuclear weapons or dirty bombs,” Foster said, hitting notes entirely out of step with the current symphony of “renewed great power competition” played daily in and around Capitol Hill these days.
“So when the public debate on nuclear safety tends to focus on ballistic missile defense or the size of massive stockpiles, the proliferation challenges continues to evolve and, dare I say, metastasize, significantly,” Foster added. “Because, unfortunately, there are many ways that exist to deliver a nuclear weapon.”
As with infrastructure, it is rare to hear a lawmaker come out against any part of NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account: the generally upward of $2 billion program aimed to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of people and groups who, the U.S. thinks, might harm Americans or their allies.
Practically speaking, that includes stationary and mobile radiation detectors in contested border zones throughout the Balkans, Middle East, and Asia, along with detectors for airports in those regions. It even, according to the NNSA’s 2020 budget request, involves spending on detectors designed to scan small vessels at sea for potentially illicit nuclear and radioactive materials.
In round numbers, all of the NNSA’s nonproliferation spending is somewhere between 8% and 12% of the roughly $12.5 billion the agency has proposed spending within its Weapons Activities account to maintain and modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the 2020 fiscal year. Overall, and including naval reactors programs, the agency seeks $16.5 billion for 2020.
The NNSA nonproliferation line item represents no more than a 6% share of the entire DOE budget of roughly $30 billion, which includes plenty of non-nuclear programs in addition to the Environmental Management office’s substantial portfolio of Cold War nuclear-weapons cleanup.
Relative to what the Pentagon spends to maintain and modernize the missiles that carry NNSA’s warheads, and the aircraft, submarines, and silos loaded with those lethal delivery vehicles, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation is a drop in a barrel.
And yet, Congress, over the past 15 years and three presidential administrations, has been by the numbers more of a tempering force than a booster for the NNSA’s nonproliferation portfolio.
The House Appropriations Committee loudly had the program’s back in the first half of the 2020 appropriations cycle, but lawmakers over the last decade-and-a-half have played whack-a-mole with the NNSA’s nonproliferation request about as often as not.
In five of the past 15 years, Congress wound up appropriating 90% or less for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation than the NNSA requested. The most pronounced gaps appeared during the early years of the Barack Obama administration, when the agency bucked four years running for a nonproliferation budget of $2.5 billion or greater.
The Obama White House got its way only once in that span, when nonproliferation spending touched a 15-year high of about $2.5 billion in 2013 – the year that automatic budget cuts known as sequestration prompted a deal of hair-pulling at other agencies.
Now that the House Appropriations Committee has had its say, the panel’s proposed NNSA budget, with its nonproliferation dollars, will go to the House floor for a vote the chamber’s Democratic leadership had not scheduled at deadline.
After that, the Senate could start work on its own energy and water development bill at the subcommittee level. Nonproliferation has strong allies there, even if most of them are Democrats and in the upper chamber’s minority.
