The roughly $20 billion 2021 budget the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) requested on Monday — a figure that would come at the expense of the Pentagon’s naval shipbuilding budget and, to a lesser extent, cleanup of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex — is “the right number” to reverse a decade of “neglect,” Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said Monday.

“We feel very strongly about that word, neglect,” Brouillette told reporters during a conference call on his agency’s latest budget request. “Congress is very supportive, we think, of this number, [and] we’re going to work closely with them to get that number as close to $19.8 [billion] as we possibly can.” 

Brouillette called from Vienna, Austria, alongside NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, while they are attending the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear Conference on Nuclear Security. It was one of their first public appearances together since Gordon-Hagerty and nuclear hawks in Congress reportedly prevailed upon President Donald Trump to seek $20 billion for DOE’s semiautonomous nuclear arms branch in the budget year that begins Oct. 1.

Brouillette had backed the $17.5 billion proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, The Dispatch reported last month. 

The Energy Department had not released its detailed 2021 budget justification at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, so it remains unclear exactly which programs would benefit most from the NNSA’s hoped-for windfall from Capitol Hill. The agency has a $16.7 billion budget for 2020. 

Weapons Activities would get the lion’s share, according to the budget information that did trickle out Monday. The NNSA division manages nuclear arms life-extension programs and the buildout of weapons production infrastructure, including the NNSA’s proposed two-state complex for manufacturing plutonium pits. It would receive a roughly 25% year-over-year increase, to more than $15.5 billion, under the White House spending plan. That is far higher than the roughly $12.8 billion the agency forecast, in its 2020 budget request about a year ago, that Weapons Activities would need for fiscal 2021. Weapons Activities took home about $12.5 billion budget in 2020.

One of the highlight-reel programs listed in an NNSA press release on the budget is preliminary work on a W93 warhead, or Next Navy Warhead, that would tip the eventual replacement for the submarine service’s Trident II D5 missile. 

The NNSA’s other main accounts, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation and Naval Reactors, would respectively get a small cut from the 2020 appropriation and a small raise. For the most part, the White House requested the NNSA not cut its own programs to fund the large increase for the nuclear weapons account.

Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, which aims to counter nuclear smuggling and dispose of surplus fissile material, would get roughly $2 billion, down about 6% compared with the 2020 budget. That is roughly the level NNSA forecast last year that it would need for 2021.

NNSA Naval Reactors, which designs and produces nuclear power plants and fuel for the Navy, would get $1.7 billion, roughly a 2% raise over the 2020 appropriation. That is only a little higher than the agency’s most recent forecast for the mission-critical account.

Reports that the Department of Defense would be the major bill payer for the NNSA boost were borne out Monday, when the Pentagon announced it would seek funding in fiscal 2021 for one Virginia-class attack submarine, rather than two. The boats are nuclear powered, but armed only with conventional weapons.

The DOE Office of Environmental Management, which oversees remediation of nuclear-weapon production sites dating to the Manhattan Project, would likewise be asked to make do with fewer funds in 2021. The administration is seeking $6.1 billion for the cleanup office, which is almost $1.5 billion below the 2020 appropriation, and even lower than the White House’s 2020 Environmental Management request of $6.5 billion,