A House committee’s first draft of an annual defense policy bill would increase funding for plutonium pit production, a controversial sea-launched cruise missile warhead and other nuclear weapons modernization programs.
While House Armed Services subcommittees, including the strategic forces subcommittee, were debating their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Tuesday, the full committee published the version of the bill it will consider next week.
Weapons programs boosted in the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) draft of the NDAA got the extra funding mostly through cuts to Stockpile Research, Technology and Engineering account, which funds personnel and equipment used to maintain the current nuclear weapons arsenal without resorting to explosive testing.
Department of Energy defense nuclear programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) largely avoided budget cuts when Congress passed – and President Biden signed – the “Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023,” the bipartisan deal to cut federal spending and raise the U.S. debt ceiling, earlier this month.
The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility received a modest increase of $142 million to a nearly-even $1 billion from a proposed $858 million. An integral part of the NNSA’s goal of producing 80 plutonium pits per year in the 2030s, Savannah River in South Carolina will make at least 50 of those pits at the facility. The other 30 will be produced by the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.
Savannah River’s Tritium Finishing Facility, which will replace the old H-area manufacturing facility, also received $37 million in HASC’s version of the bill. The White House requested no funding.
High explosives production at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, received a modest bump in funding from the committee, which granted it $83 million where the initial NDAA requested no funding for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
The panel included $70 million for development of a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 warhead, which would be carried by a controversial sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCM-N. The Biden administration, which wants to cancel the SLCM-N, zeroed out funding for the weapon which it considers redundant to the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile warhead. It is the second year the White House has proposed blanking the cruise missile development program.
These increases would be offset largely by $130 million in cuts to Stockpile Research Technology and Engineering, leaving the account with a little more than $3 billion, compared with the $3.19 billion requested.
The committee’s NDAA would also slash dismantlement and disposition of existing nuclear weapons by $17 million to $36.7 million, compared with the requested $53.7 million, Non-proliferation and arms control programs would also come in $25 million lower in the committee’s bill, at $187 million from a requested $212 million.
The HASC strategic subcommittee, which oversees NNSA nuclear weapons development funding, completed its NDAA markup early Tuesday without debate and with a single amendment to remove two unnecessary pages added to the mark by mistake made by subcommittee Chairman Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.).
A provision of the subcommittee’s version of the NDAA would limit travel funding for NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby to 80% until the NNSA provides a pair of reports to the House Armed Services Committee. One of those is about the modernization of the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, the central service center for U.S. nuclear weapons. The other is a report on NNSA “management and operation contract risk mitigation.” Congress ordered the reports in previous NDAAs.
The subcommittee’s mark also added another item of homework to Hruby’s plate. It includes a requirement that within 120 days of the passage of the final NDAA, the NNSA administrator provide Congress with a uranium enrichment strategy “dedicated to satisfying Department of Defense requirements.”
This story first appeared in Defense Daily affiliate publication Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.