The House on Friday passed a stopgap budget that would hold the National Nuclear Security Administration to its fiscal year 2022 budget through Dec. 19 and allow work to continue on pit production plants, the B83 gravity bomb and a nuclear, sea-launched cruise-missile warhead.
The continuing resolution will put a crunch on the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency’s plutonium pit program though, which now will get a drizzle of fiscal- year-2022-equivalent funding for two-and-a-half months instead of at least a 40% year-over-year raise.
The House of Representatives approved the band-aid budget bill 230-201 on Friday afternoon and sent it to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature, averting a midnight government shutdown and effectively postponing the need for further debate about the federal budget until after the midterm elections; partisan control of the House and Senate is up for grabs.
Under the continuing resolution, which the Senate approved Thursday, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would receive the annualized equivalent of $26.65 billion it got in fiscal year 2022, plus an extra $35 million “to respond to potential nuclear and radiological incidents in Ukraine, assist Ukrainian partners with security of nuclear and radiological materials, and prevent illicit smuggling of nuclear and radiological material,” according to a bill summary.
The 2022 budget allowed NNSA to continue working on a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 cruise missile warhead and the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb: programs that some fiscal year 2023 defense spending bills produced in Congress this year would kill, at the Joe Biden administration’s request. Lawmakers on the whole though remain split on the programs’ fate and in the past few years have generally allowed them to continue rather than obstruct omnibus spending bills.
Plutonium pits are the big loser under the continuing resolution, if only temporarily.
Plutonium modernization, the category that includes construction of planned pit plants at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., will get the annualized equivalent of $1.7 billion under the continuing resolution.
This summer, the full House approved the Joe Biden Administration’s request to up that figure to $2.4 billion, mostly due to the urgent needs at Los Alamos, which is supposed to be the first of the two planned plants to produce war-ready nuclear-weapon cores.
The Senate Appropriations Committee, in a bill released in July, proposed going even further and increasing the Plutonium Modernization budget to some $2.9 billion, or about 70% more than the 2022 appropriation. Unlike the House and the Biden administration, the Senate wanted to pour billions more into construction of the pit factory planned for the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Meanwhile, nuclear-weapon life extension and major alteration programs, NNSA’s bread and butter, would feel few pinches under the continuing resolution. The House and the Senate committee each proposed meeting the White House’s request of roughly $2.87 billion for fiscal year 2023, which itself was only a marginal increase over the $2.83 billion appropriated for fiscal 2022.
On top of that, the continuing resolution will provide funding for one life extension program that the NNSA finished last year, giving the agency a large enough pot of money to make any short-changed programs whole via a funds-reprogramming request to Congress.
The stopgap has the equivalent of $207 million for the W76 life extension program that the NNSA has wrapped up, more than enough to bridge the roughly $45-million gap between the 2023 request for the Stockpile Major Modernization budget and the 2022 appropriation.
Stockpile Major Modernization is where the NNSA book keeps nuclear-weapon refurbs including life extensions and major alterations.
The Senate passed the continuing resolution bill on a 72-25 vote Thursday, just days before members of the upper chamber were to return home to campaign ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The 2023 fiscal year begins at 12:00 a.m. on Oct. 1.
