More than a week after the Senate confirmed him for the job, Brent Park was sworn in Tuesday as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s top nonproliferation official.
Park will be deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation: the roughly $2 billion-a-year stovepipe charged with controlling the spread of weaponizable nuclear material while encourage peaceful atomic programs.
President Donald Trump nominated Park on Feb. 13 and the Senate confirmed him unanimously in a March 22 floor vote. The NNSA announced the swearing-in Tuesday in a press release.
Park comes to NNSA headquarters in Washington after almost eight years at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he earned nonproliferation stripes as director of the laboratory’s Global Security Directorate. Park was replaced in that role by James Peery.
Park sailed through his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, though Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked the nuclear physicist to take a trip, if confirmed, to see the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The NNSA wants to cancel the facility, which is being built to process 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of a major arms control pact with Russia.
Park told Graham the visit would be among his “highest priorities.”
The NNSA’s nonproliferation budget was targeted for a cut by the Trump administration this year, but instead got a 6-percent year-over-year raise to about $1.9 billion under the 2018 omnibus signed into law on March 23.
The administration’s 2019 funding request — which was written before Congress erased caps on federal spending earlier this year — would cut nonproliferation spending back almost 7 percent to $1.8 billion. That is about the level at which Congress was prepared to fund those programs in draft 2018 appropriations bills they produced last summer, when spending limits were still in place.
