The Department of Defense would get more control over the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons budget under the Senate version of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) unveiled this week.
The Senate Armed Services Committee filed the text of the bill, which sets funding limits and policy for defense programs, late Tuesday evening. The panel approved the $740 billion legislation earlier this month, with the full Senate expected to take it up in July.
The measure authorizes the roughly $20 billion budget that National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty wanted for her agency: a 20% year-over-year raise that her boss, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, opposed during the internal 2021 DOE budget debate.
Gordon-Hagerty backed up her request with a yearlong internal NNSA study, details of which appeared on Capitol Hill in January, about a month before the final budget proposal dropped for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. The administrator said the NNSA’s nuclear-arsenal modernization portfolio was underfunded by more than $15 billion over five years.
Also in January, like-minded lawmakers from Capitol Hill appeared in the Oval Office to urge President Donald Trump to go along with the number the NNSA favored.
Following those events, first reported by The Dispatch and Roll Call, senators decided to sharpen existing laws about how the civilian nuclear weapons agency clears its budget request with the Pentagon and the broader DOE.
Under the Senate committee’s NDAA, the joint DOE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council would vet the NNSA’s budget request before it goes to the White House Office of Management and Budget for final approval. If the council thinks the budget request is adequate, it must tell the secretary of energy so. If the council thinks the NNSA isn’t seeking enough money for any given weapons program, it can tell the secretary of energy that as well. The DOE chief would then be required to request that funding for NNSA.
The energy secretary would also be authorized to raise any concerns about the council’s directive with the Office of Management and Budget, and what NNSA budget he or she would prefer, according to the committee’s bill.
An NNSA spokesperson on Wednesday said the agency had adhered to the “routine, deliberative budgeting process” in developing its 2021 budget in cooperation with the Department of Energy and Office of Management and Budget.
Also, as reported by media last week, the committee’s NDAA includes language from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that authorizes $10 million to speed up preparations for a nuclear explosive test, “if necessary.” Funding for test preparations would have to come out of the NNSA’s Stockpile Responsiveness Program, according to the legislative text.
Congress created the Stockpile Responsiveness Program in the 2016 NDAA so that the NNSA and the Pentagon would have a spending account dedicated to the study of emerging threats, technology challenges, and flight tests for weapons prototypes.
The Washington Post reported in May that the Donald Trump administration discussed conducting a nuclear-explosive test, which the NNSA has eschewed for decades, as a means of convincing Russia and China to discuss a new trilateral nuclear arms control treaty.
The House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to mark up its version of the NDAA on Wednesday and Thursday of next week. The lower chamber’s authorizing committee actually recommended slightly more funding for the NNSA than the Senate’s did. House Armed Services proposed $2.1 billion for nuclear nonproliferation, up from the $2 billion requested, and provided by the Senate committee’s bill. Otherwise, both bills authorize the NNSA to spend at its requested level.
One thing both bills have in common is a requirement that the NNSA start doing some headquarters-level oversight of the nuclear-weapon industrial base. The Senate committee’s measure recommends that the agency designate “a senior official within the [NNSA] responsible for monitoring the industrial base supporting NNSA’s nuclear weapons programs.” The House’s bill just tells the NNSA to figure out some kind of central oversight regime for the specialized components and materials needed to make and maintain nuclear weapons.
The Senate bill also calls for continued Government Accountability Office reviews of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, the silo-based successor for the Air Force’s nuclear-tipped Minuteman III. The services wants to deploy the new missiles starting aound 2030.
