David Beck, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), told Congress this week he would give them a plan for spending fiscal 2026 reconciliation funds “within the next 30 days.”
Beck was responding to a question by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) while testifying in front of the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee. “We would like to see what the plan is for allocating those funds,” King said.
President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act made $3.135 billion available between fiscal 2025 and 2029 for NNSA. King said the committee was “still waiting for the plan” for how the funds would be spent.
“We have a plan for that, we have delivered it in part,” Beck responded. “I don’t know that we’ve given the complete plan to you, because there’s been some questions about allocation with respect to the letter of intent involved with that. We are working with your staff to finalize that, and as soon as we have that, we’ll provide that to you, I suspect within the next 30 days.”
In response to a question by subcommittee chair Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) on NNSA’s enterprise blueprint released in October 2024, Beck also said the blueprint would be updated “within the next few months.”
“The enterprise blueprint is a very good business tool to project modernization efforts over the next 25 years,” but “I’m personally a little frustrated that it’s not fast enough and costs too much,” Beck said. “We’re working, as I mentioned in my earlier remarks, working to fix that problem, speed things up as a commercial standard for possible and try to provide things at low cost.”
Beck added that “we’ve already made significant progress on PF-4 [the main plutonium production facility at Los Alamos], and the Uranium Processing Facility and Lithium Processing Facility, and we will be able to provide that update with the blueprint tool.”