The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday unveiled the year’s most generous 2023 budget proposal for Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs, beating the White House’s ask by almost $700 million and agreeing with authorizers’ plans to pile unrequested money into plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site.
As the House of Representatives did in an appropriations bill passed last week, the Senate committee’s bill would not provide funding for a low-yield, nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise-missile warhead but would allow DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to maintain the megaton capable B83 gravity bomb. President Joe Biden’s administration wants to kill both programs.
The bill published Thursday by the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee would provide $22.1 billion for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), steward of the U.S. nuclear weapons design and production complex. That is some $690 million more than requested and about $870 million more than the full House approved for NNSA in a bundle of spending bills passed last week.
According to the detailed report released with the bill, the Senate committee’s proposal would also provide roughly $1.3 billion, $500 million more than requested, to build the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The White House requested only $758 million for pit work in South Carolina, with NNSA officials testifying before Congress this year that more money would not allow the agency to annually make at least 50 of the fissile nuclear-weapon cores at the plant by 2030: a legally binding deadline the agency acknowledged last summer it would blow by two to five years.
Only the House appropriations bill meets the administration’s request for pits in South Carolina. The House and Senate National Defense Authorization Acts each would permit NNSA to spend roughly what Senate appropriators have now proposed to provide for construction of the plant.
In a foreshadowing that Senate Democrats might have to pass their version of the 2023 DOE budget bill without Republican help, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, on Wednesday issued a statement with the headline “Partisan Bills Threaten FY23 Appropriations Process.”
The Senate energy and water spending bill, one of 12 the committee released Thursday, was until this week the only missing piece of fiscal year 2023’s DOE nuclear-weapons appropriations puzzle.
The full House has passed its fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act and a DOE spending bill and the Senate Armed Services Committee released its version of the authorization act in July.
If both the House and Senate take their usual August recess from legislative business in Washington, they will have only about a month to hammer out the many differences in their competing authorization and appropriations acts before the 2023 fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.
Without a compromise bill, Congress will have to extend fiscal year 2022 budgets using a stopgap spending law called a continuing resolution.
Continuing resolutions largely forbid agencies from beginning work on programs that were not funded in the fiscal year budget that the resolution extends. Even with a continuing resolution in place for all or part of fiscal year 2023, the NNSA could continue work on the W80-4 sea-launched warhead and the B83 bomb, if Congress does not explicitly orders the agency not to.
