As part of a package of spending bills set to hit the floor late this week, the House of Representatives will debate the merits of temporarily freezing the Pentagon out of internal Department of Energy nuclear-weapon budget debates.
The debate will take about 10 minutes of floor time, which the House Rules Committee granted in its floor rule for a multi-bill minibus appropriations package that contains, among others, the budgets for the Pentagon and the Department of Energy. The Democrat-controlled House approved those rules of debate late Wednesday, setting up floor action for the balance of the week.
The House Appropriations Committee’s 2021 DOE spending bill would forbid the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from using any funding in the upcoming year to collaborate with the joint Pentagon-Energy Department Nuclear Weapons Council on a future budget request. Committee Democrats had to cram the bill through to the floor on a party-line vote. The bill provides $18 billion for the NNSA, which is an 8% raise over 2020, but 9% below the $20 billion or so the agency sought.
At least two Republicans have publicly spoken out against banning interagency collaboration on the civilian nuclear-weapons budget.
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) was first, rising in the mid-July Appropriations Committee markup to say that prohibiting collaboration with the Nuclear Weapons Council — which happens most every year, to some degree — was a bad idea that might disrupt the intended function of the interagency nuclear-weapons procurement body. The two agencies collaborate to make sure NNSA and DOD nuclear-weapon acquisitions sync up.
But it is Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) who will sponsor the debate on the House floor. The ranking member of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee wrote an amendment to repeal the collaboration-ban in the energy and water portion of the mimibus, and the Rules Committee let it through to the floor.
The floor arguments will be the latest turn in the year’s debate about how much influence the Pentagon should have over the NNSA’s budget.
The Senate Armed Services Committee wanted to give the Nuclear Weapons Council a sort of veto power on the secretary of energy’s budget request for the NNSA. However, the full Senate softened that part of the upper chamber’s 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to limit the council’s to a memo the secretary of energy would have to forward to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The office vets all agency budget requests before those annual funding asks go publicly to Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, Turner’s other nuclear-weapons amendment for the 2021 DOE budget bill never made it out of the Rules Committee. In that amendment, Turner proposed an $85-million increase for NNSA weapons programs, which would have come at the expense of agency nuclear nonproliferation programs and legacy nuclear-weapons cleanup handled by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the Army Corps of Engineers.
