Congress inched a little closer to finalizing a 2019 budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration this week after the Senate passed a “minibus” appropriations package, but the two chambers still have about half a billion dollars’ worth of differences over nuclear weapon and nonproliferation spending to hash out in a bicameral conference committee.
The conference committee, the meeting of House and Senate lawmakers that happens after the chambers pass different versions of the same bill, was not scheduled at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The spending plan encompasses three ordinarily separate appropriations bills that lawmakers bundled together in hopes of speeding their passage through Congress.
For fiscal 2019, the Senate proposed about $14.8 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), while the House recommended around $15.3 billion. The two chambers disagree on how much to spend upgrading, maintaining, and repairing NNSA buildings and nuclear materials facilities in the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
The White House sought $15 billion, give or take, for 2019. That is up from about a $14.5 billion budget in 2018. The proposed increase would mostly benefit active nuclear-weapon programs, particularly the NNSA’s W80-4 life-extension program. The White House wants the agency to speed up that work so the refurbished W80-4 is ready to fly next decade aboard the new air-launched cruise missile — called the Long-Range Standoff Weapon — Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are designing for the Pentagon. The warhead would get a $255 million boost to $655 million in fiscal 2019, no matter which chamber’s NNSA budget language becomes law.
[Click here to view the ExchangeMonitor’s National Nuclear Security Administration budget tracker, comparing the White House’s request with Congress’ proposals and the current budget.]
Generally, the proposed House and Senate NNSA budgets are more similar than different.
Both 2019 spending proposals include $65 million for the semiautonomous Department of Energy branch to start work on a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead called for in February in the Donald Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. Both bills also fully fund the NNSA’s ongoing life-extension and major alteration programs for existing nuclear weapons.
Disagreements arose between the two chambers about how much funding was available for new construction, repairs, maintenance, and upgrades of NNSA infrastructure. These activities, book-kept under the NNSA’s infrastructure and operations budget, would get much less funding if the Senate’s version of the 2019 budget became law. The upper chamber would provide about $2.8 billion for infrastructure and operations in 2019, which is 13 percent less than the House’s $3.2-billion, proposal and around 8 percent less than the roughly $3 billion the White House requested.
Specifically, the Senate proposed much smaller appropriations for a pair of spending lines within the infrastructure and operations budget that can be tapped to fund improvements just about anywhere in the NNSA complex: maintenance and repair of facilities, and recapitalization. The former account, typically for fixing existing infrastructure, would get $250 million, or about 30 percent less than requested, under the Senate proposal. The latter, which generally pays for new infrastructure, would receive $425 million, or some 20 percent less than requested.
“These reductions are inconsistent with congressional direction to accelerate vital recapitalization and modernization of the NNSA’s aging infrastructure and to reduce deferred maintenance,” the Donald Trump administration wrote in a statement of administration policy about the Senate bill.
The House went the other way from the Senate, proposing more than the administration requested for both maintenance and repair of facilities — $515 million compared with $365 million — and recapitalization — $613 million compared with $541 million.
The Senate and House are also at loggerheads about the NNSA’s plan to cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and turn the plutonium-disposal plant into a factory for nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits.
The plant was designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-useable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia that calls for Washington and Moscow to deweaponize equal amounts of military-grade plutonium. The NNSA instead wants to make 50 pits a year at MFFF by 2030.
The Senate’s bill would provide $220 million to begin winding down construction of the MFFF. The House’s bill would provide $335 million to continue construction. The NNSA has proposed canceling the MFFF in its last three budget requests, but the House has gotten its way in the previous three conferences and construction has continued. Roughly $5 billion has been spent on the project to date.
South Carolina’s congressional delegation opposes canceling the MFFF, and the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, which is due for its own conference committee in the coming weeks, would expressly forbid doing anything but continuing to build the plant until at least fiscal 2020.
In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump administration directed the NNSA to build 80 pits a year by 2030. The agency now plans to split that work between the repurposed MFFF and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Los Alamos pit production is scheduled to come online first at the Chemistry and Metallurgy Replacement Facility, with 30 pits a year by 2026. The Senate’s 2019 NNSA spending bill would provided the $235 million the White House requested for the Los Alamos plutonium facility, while the House’s bill provides $220 million.
Senate and House appropriators also differ about how much to spend building the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that writes the NNSA’s annual budget bill, made sure the upper chamber’s legislation would provide the facility with the roughly $700 million the administration requested.
The House’s version of the 2019 NNSA budget, on the other hand, provides only $660 million or so for the Uranium Processing Facility, which once completed will shape uranium into the forms required for nuclear weapons and reactors. The NNSA says it will finish the facility by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. The new plant, being built by Bechtel National, will replace Oak Ridge’s current World War II-era uranium handling plant.
Amid the big differences about big projects are smaller differences about smaller projects.
For example, the Senate bill would provide a little more than $10 million in 2019 for a new materials staging facility at the Pantex nuclear-weapon assembly and disassembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, where personnel could temporarily place weapons and nuclear materials. The House bill has no funding for the new staging area, and the White House requested none this year.
On the other hand, the Senate’s bill zeroes out $6 million in requested funding for a new electrical power transmission system at the Nevada National Security Site. The House’s bill would meet the request.
Although lawmakers had not scheduled their conference committee at deadline, the House had started to appoint its delegates to the committee, or conferees. Among them are Reps. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee; Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), whose district includes Y-12; and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), whose district includes the Savannah River Site.
