Hommert: B61 Can ‘Survive’ Short-term Stopgap Funding Measure, but Long-Term CR ‘Gets Dicier’
Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
9/19/2014
Engineering work at Sandia National Laboratories on the refurbishment of the B61 bomb will continue during Fiscal Year 2015 largely unaffected by a short-term Continuing Resolution, but the work can’t continue as planned under Fiscal Year 2014 funding levels much longer than December, lab Director Paul Hommert told NS&D Monitor this week. Speaking on the sidelines of an event at George Washington University, Hommert said Sandia had planned for a short-term CR and had created some funding flexibility for the program.
The House and Senate passed a CR this week that will fund the government through Dec. 11, and in contrast to past years, the bill does not include a funding anomaly that would allow the NNSA to spend money at an increased rate. “We have built in a cushion of carryover so if it’s a three-month CR period we can probably minimize the impact. Anything beyond that it gets dicier,” Hommert said. “We sort of anticipated that would come. We built some margin in so we can carry ourselves for nominally that period. If it pushes into March things get more difficult and problematic and that would require some help from the Department of Energy.”
B61 Entering Key Years for Engineering
Overall, the Obama Administration requested $8.31 billion for the NNSA’s weapons program in FY 2015, a $533.9 million increase over FY 2014 enacted levels, and the B61 refurbishment was the recipient of one of the biggest proposed funding boosts. The Administration requested $643 million for the program, up $104 million from FY 2014 enacted levels. Hommert said FY 2015 and FY 2016 are the most important years for engineering on the B61, which is planned to achieve a First Production Unit by the end of FY 2020. “If we deviate significantly from the budget needs it will have schedule impact,” he said, adding, “The good news is we at Sandia have been able to come in a little bit under our cost estimates so we’ve built a little headroom for ourselves. It’s not a lot but it’s a little bit.”
The same holds true for much of NNSA, Administrator Frank Klotz said, where the W76 refurbishment, W88 Alt 370, Uranium Processing Facility and other projects are in good shape in the near-term. “Right now we’re reasonably optimistic that for the next several weeks and months we’ll be in reasonably good shape,” Klotz said. “That’s as a result of good careful production management both on the part of headquarters and our maintenance and operations partners at the labs and the facilities anticipating this might be an issue this year, based on previous experience making sure they’re well positioned to continue to operate and to continue to make progress during the period of the CR.”
CR Better than Nothing?
Klotz noted that the CR was better than the alternative, a government shutdown, which cost the agency’s weapons program approximately $330 million last fall as it prepared to shutter its highly secure facilities. “It’s better to have a CR than nothing,” Klotz said, adding: “The bottom line is we’ll be thankful for having a CR and we’ll be even more thankful if we get continuing appropriations.” Nonetheless, he noted that it’s difficult to continue to operate under a CR. “As you build a program that unfolds over 10, 20, in some cases 30 years, you try to do this with a great deal of forethought in how you will execute that,” he said. “In many cases building up your funding as you run through the various phases of the program so you depend upon increased funding from year to year as you ramp up and then you know that you’ll have decreased funding for that program. It becomes extraordinarily challenging for our program managers to execute a program if they do not have that new funding at the beginning of the fiscal year.”
The NNSA’s nonproliferation account doesn’t need a funding anomaly because the Obama Administration requested $1.55 billion for FY 2015, down $398.4 million from FY 2014, though questions still remain about how the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility will be treated under the CR as the start of FY 2015 gets closer. The Administration requested $221 million for the project in FY 2015, up from the $343.5 million the project received in FY 2014, and said it planned to put the project in “cold standby,” but it has backed off of those plans in recent months over objections from the South Carolina Congressional delegation. Lawmakers have said they expect construction to continue under the CR, but DOE has not formally committed to a plan for FY 2015.
