The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday advanced legislation that would provide $65 million more than the White House requested for fiscal 2020 for the U.S. Air Force’s next-generation, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program would receive $635 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, under the 2020 Defense Appropriations Act.
The committee’s 16-15 vote for the nearly $49 billion Energy and Water Development bill sets the Republican-controlled Senate up for a showdown with the House, where majority Democrats have approved $462 million for GBSD in a bid to slow development of the systems slated to replace some 400 1970s-vintage Minuteman III missiles starting in 2030.
The proposed House program budget for 2020 is more than 11% above the 2019 funding for the missile, but about 20% below what the administration requested for the final year of a three-year GBSD technology development competition between Minuteman III maker Boeing and Northrop Grumman.
Northrop is now the only company publicly interested in building and deploying the new missile. In July, Leanne Caret, CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, wrote to the Pentagon that the company would not bid on a potentially $25 billion Air Force contract for GBSD anticipated by September 2020. The service has said it will acquire more than 600 missiles and deploy about 400.
Whether GBSD deployment begins — and ends — on time depends on more than the Air Force’s procurement strategy.
The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) still must start up production of GBSD’s W87-1 warhead, beginning with their fissile plutonium cores, or pits. The NNSA plans to support GBSD by cranking out 80 pits annually at upgraded manufacturing facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a planned new plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
As with GBSD itself, the Senate was willing to provide more money for the NNSA’s pit infrastructure upgrades than the White House requested: $720 million, compared with an ask of a little more than $710 million. House appropriators moved to throttle back pit funding in 2020, recommending about $470 million for the NNSA Plutonium Sustainment account that funds both Los Alamos and Savannah River pit infrastructure. That is about $240 million less than requested.
At Los Alamos, the NNSA would begin expanding the Plutonium Facility to prepare it for higher-throughput manufacturing. The NNSA wants to hit 10 pits a year at Los Alamos by 2024, on the way to 30 annually by 2030. At Savannah River, the agency in 2020 would continue the redesign of the former Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a pit plant capable of churning out 50 pits a year by 2030.
House appropriators are skeptical the NNSA needs as much money as requested for the planned Savannah River plant, and that the Pentagon needs to begin deploying GBSD missiles as rapidly as defense officials say it does.
Congress is preparing to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government operating into November, until lawmakers can approve a full budget. The House could vote next week on the stopgap measure, The Hill reported.
