The Senate on Tuesday passed the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, setting spending limits for nuclear weapons and waste programs and tinkering with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s authorizing law.
The Senate approved the bill 85-14. Voting no were three Republicans, 10 Democrats and one independent who caucuses with Democrats. President Joe Biden (D) had not said on Tuesday whether he would sign the bill, which is usually widely bipartisan.
This year, there was a Democratic backlash against the bill in the House, where 124 members of the President’s party voted against the annual defense policy bill, which sets spending limits for programs including civilian nuclear weapons programs.
Some of the no votes in the House were because of a provision inserted by House Republicans that restricts some medical treatments for transgender-identifying children of service members. An early Senate draft of the bill had a similar provision. Eighty-one House Democrats still voted for the bill last week.
For the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act sets a spending limit of about $25 billion, even with Biden’s request but less than either House or Senate appropriators proposed over the summer in unreconciled appropriations bills.
The NNSA, and other federal agencies, have had their budgets frozen at 2024 levels since October and will make do with their year-ago budgets until March, if a continuing resolution released Monday evening in the House becomes law. NNSA has the equivalent of a $24.1 billion budget under the current stopgap budget.
Aside from authorizing the requested funding for NNSA, the 2025 NDAA would, among other things, amend the law that created the NNSA to declare that the agency’s weapons production infrastructure and nuclear know-how contribute to the “deterrence of strategic attacks.”
Meanwhile, under the 2025 NDAA, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management would be authorized to spend a little under the requested level of $3 billion for defense environmental cleanup. The account, the largest in the office, funds cleanup of shuttered nuclear weapons production sites.
The latest NDAA also would let the Office of Environmental Management expedite cleanup at certain sites if doing so would help NNSA missions.
