Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who this year secured full construction funding for a crucial defense uranium plant in his state, announced this week he will leave the Senate after 2020.
Alexander chairs the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, in which capacity he is the gatekeeper for upper chamber funding of the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). He has held the gavel there since 2015.
Should Republicans retain control of the Senate following the 2020 elections, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) are tied for seniority on the full Appropriations Committee, among panel members who do not already chair one of its 12 subcommittees. Of the pair, only Kennedy serves on the energy and water subcommittee now.
As part of the NNSA’s fiscal 2019 budget of about $15 billion, the energy and water subcommittee provided some $700 million for the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) being built at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
After multiple trips to the drawing board, and amid a federal lawsuit by anti-nuclear groups, the National Nuclear Security Administration shouldered UPF into its construction phase in late March. In doing so, the agency formally promised to build UPF by 2025 for no more than $6.5 billion: caps Alexander and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, previously pressed the agency to adopt.
Alexander, not by any means Senate’s loudest voice on nuclear matters, delivered every penny the White House sought for UPF. In the process, the NNSA’s appropriations cardinal froze out maneuvers by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to secure more money for a competing nuclear-security construction project, the now-canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina. President Donald Trump signed the agency’s budget bill in September.
The Uranium Processing Facility will produce secondary stages for nuclear weapons and processes uranium fuel for naval warships. The plant is crucial to the 30-year nuclear-arsenal modernization plan started by the Barack Obama administration, and Alexander will be its sentinel on the Hill for two more appropriations cycles.
Despite his great influence over DOE, and his support for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty during the Obama years, Alexander never took a passionate interest in U.S. nuclear weapons, one D.C.-based think-tanker said.
“Though Alexander supported the Obama and so far has supported the Trump National Nuclear Security Administration modernization plans, he’s not an ideologue on the issue,” said Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Washington-based Arms Control Association.
The former two-term Tennessee governor, 78, has served in the Senate since 2003. Previous jobs included secretary of education during the George H.W. Bush administration and president of the University of Tennessee.
