The Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed the final version of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, clearing the way for President Donald Trump to sign a bill that allows the Department of Energy to build a low-yield nuclear warhead.
The $717 billion bill sailed through the Senate on an 87-10 vote, less than a week after the House approved the measure. The legislation sets spending limits and policy for defense programs for the budget year beginning Oct. 1, including the entire portfolio for DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The White House had not issued a statement of administration policy about the bill at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The administration griped about certain provisions in both the House and Senate versions of the NDAA earlier this year, but made no veto threats.
For the NNSA, the bill authorizes $15 billion in appropriations. It would allow the DOE branch to spend $65 million to create a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead by modifying an unspecified number of existing W76 warheads. That warhead tips Trident II-D5 missiles carried by Ohio-class submarines, as will the low-yield version. Appropriators in both chambers have already agreed to provide the $65 million in 2019, although they have not yet passed a unified appropriations bill for Trump to sign.
The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) essentially maintains a legal requirement that Congress authorize any NNSA design work, beyond cursory planning, on new or modified nuclear weapons.
Elsewhere in the bill, the NDAA authorizes the NNSA to spend $220 million to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The agency wants to cancel construction of the plutonium disposal plant and turn the site into a factory for fissile nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium pits.
The authorization is $125 million less than the MFFF received in appropriations this year, and exactly what the White House requested to wind down construction of the facility. However, the bill directs that the NNSA use the 2019 appropriation, plus any funds “otherwise made available,” only for construction.
Pit manufacturing is a key part of the overall U.S. nuclear modernization mission. The Pentagon wants the NNSA to manufacture at least 80 pits per year by 2030. The NNSA wants to use the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the converted Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, with the former set to come online in 2026 at a rate of 30 pits a year. The South Carolina plant would handle the balance, but the NNSA faces legal and political challenges to its plan for turning it into a weapons facility.
Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said this week during a conference in La Vista, Neb., that the NNSA needs to resolve these issues by the end of the year to meet the Pentagon’s 2030 deadline for pit production. The 2019 NDAA requires agency Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to report to Congress about whether Los Alamos could handle the pit mission by itself. The report would be due 180 days after the NDAA becomes law.
The 2019 NDAA also:
- Rejects a Senate-backed plan to increase the NNSA’s autonomy from the secretary of energy.
- Calls on the NNSA administrator to conduct a wellness survey among employees of U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories.
- Orders the NNSA and the Pentagon to arrange swaps of civilian and military nuclear-weapons personnel.
- Orders the chair of the Nuclear Weapons Council — the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics — to propose by Feb. 15 a way to better synchronize the schedules of NNSA nuclear warhead life-extension programs with development of the Pentagon’s next-generation delivery vehicles. That would include new cruise and ballistic missiles expected to be deployed in the late 2020s.
Congress is now away for its August recess. The Senate will return Aug. 13 to work on appropriations bills, but that means little for the NNSA and the rest of the Department of Energy, with the House out until after Labor Day.
The House proposed a 2019 NNSA appropriation of more than $15 billion, while the Senate recommended just under $15 billion.
The so-called minibus appropriations bill that includes NNSA’s 2019 budget, and which would actually appropriate the funding the 2019 NDAA authorizes, was scheduled for final conference negotiations in mid-July. Those fell through and had not been rescheduled at deadline Friday. Both chambers of Congress must be present for a conference negotiation: the bicameral process that distills differing House and Senate bills into a compromise measure that can be signed into law.
