The House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee on Monday approved the nuclear-weapons parts of the chamber’s fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. The brief markup sets the stage for the full committee to consider the legislation on July 1.
It took only about 15 minutes, without debate or amendments, for the panel to advance its portions of the annual defense policy bill that sets spending caps for Pentagon programs, plus nuclear weapons and cleanup programs at the Department of Energy.
In doing so, the subcommittee did not say whether it had approved authorization of the 20% annual raise, to roughly $20 billion, that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) seeks for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. It was a controversial request that the GOP-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee granted earlier this month in its $740 billion version of the 2021 NDAA, but which House appropriators and authorizers have been loathe to support.
The House Armed Services strategic forces mark does not include specific spending limits for DOE nuclear programs. The actual money would be provided through separate appropriations bills, which have not yet been submitted in the House or Senate.
The strategic forces panel did release a few noncontroversial NNSA measures as part of a bill summary over the weekend, including:
- Requiring the agency by Feb. 1, 2021, to report to Congress about how the agency can monitor its highly specialized nuclear-weapons industrial base, with an initial briefing by Aug. 1 of this year from the NNSA administrator that identifies the resources the agency needs to keep the base in good health.
- Demanding also by Aug. 1, 2020, a report on reducing the risks and costs of transitioning the NNSA enterprise from its period of post-Cold War stockpile maintenance to 21st century production of refurbished nuclear weapons as part of the Stockpile Responsiveness program.
- Calling for a Government Accountability Office report about the assistance the NNSA’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation provides to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards program. The report should touch on “how effective has assistance provided by the Department of Energy, NNSA, and other agencies been in strengthening safeguards approaches, technologies, staff, and other resources, and where are the continuing gaps or issues of concern,” according to a bill summary. The Government Accountability Office would have to brief congressional Armed Services committees on its findings by Jan. 30, 2021.
