A backup defense authorization act unveiled this week would authorize $16.5 billion in Department of Energy nuclear-weapon spending for 2020, and explicitly authorize new program starts to bolster nuclear warhead and naval fuel efforts.
Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) lifted the lid on the so-called “skinny” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) late Tuesday.
The measure drops many of the specific policy prescriptions of the larger NDAA in an effort to avoid partisan disagreements that could derail the bill, Inhofe said. Chiefly, the bill would extend some Pentagon spending authorities — payments for military personnel and funds for some overseas war operations — beyond their current sunset date of Dec. 31.
With Senate Democrats this week blocking a full-year 2020 spending bill containing money for DOE and the Pentagon — because the bills would also fund President Donald Trump’s proposed southern border wall — prospects rose for the second short-term budget of the still-young fiscal year.
Aside from authorizing spending on defense nuclear programs generally, the skinny NDAA would among other things authorize DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to expand a Los Alamos National Laboratory facility in preparation to begin producing war-usable plutonium-pits — nuclear-weapon cores.
Los Alamos is on tap to produce 10 pits a year for W87-1-style warhead by 2024, and 30 a year by 2026. The warheads would be suitable for use on future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles slated to replace the existing nuclear-tipped Minuteman III fleet beginning in 2030. The NNSA aims to produce 80 pits a year by 2030 between Los Alamos and a planned plant in South Carolina called the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. The later would be built from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The skinny bill also would authorize the NNSA to expand part of the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York to continue researching nuclear fuel improvements for the Navy.
Democratic lawmakers from the House majority, including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), still say they would prefer to pass a full NDAA. Bicameral conference negotiations over that bill have stalled, again as Democrats resist Republican efforts to use the Pentagon’s budget to fund the wall.
The Senate Armed Services Committee had not scheduled a vote on the skinny bill at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Even if the bill, or the larger NDAA, passes, NNSA defense-nuclear programs could still struggle to hit their 2020 targets if they are again stuck with a continuing resolution that extends the 2019 budget further into the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The current continuing resolution runs through Nov. 21.
At 2019 levels, the NNSA would get about $15.2 billion in another bridge budget: much lower than either the $16.5 billion requested for 2020, the House’s proposed $16 billion, or the Senate’s recommended $17 billion.
Appropriations bills set policy and spending limits for appropriations bills, which are written by separate committees.
The NNSA’s portfolio of nuclear-weapons modernization, maintenance, and nonproliferation programs would be authorized under the skinny bill at the annual level of $16.5 billion: exactly what the White House requested, and more than the $15.9 billion the House NDAA would authorize.
Specific NNSA new starts allowed under the bill are:
- Expansion of the KL Fuel Development Laboratory at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. The NNSA would be authorized to spend more than $23.5 million improving the site, which researches nuclear fuel technology for U.S. naval warships and submarines.
- The General Purpose Project for the Plutonium Facility’s (PF-4) Power and Communications Systems Upgrade at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The NNSA would be authorized to spend $16 million on those non-nuclear improvements, if the skinny NDAA becomes law. PF-4 would produce Los Alamos’ share of future plutonium pits.
