March 17, 2014

DoD WANTS MORE

By ExchangeMonitor

The Pentagon’s willingness to transfer additional budget authority to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons program depends largely on the appetite in Congress for the agency’s modernization program, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller told NW&M Monitor. The Pentagon transferred $5.7 billion of its budget authority for Fiscal Years 2011-2015—and another $290 million on top of that for FY2012—to drive massive increases in the NNSA’s budget, but DoD officials have been frustrated that a budget-conscious Congress hasn’t completely gone along with the funding plan to upgrade the nation’s nuclear weapons complex and arsenal. “It’s possible that we can contribute more but … if we were to do so it would need to be in the context of an agreed profile where we have confidence that Congress is going to support the funding,” Miller said in an interview.

Congressional appropriators have not fully supported the Obama Administration’s $7.6 billion FY2012 request for the NNSA’s weapons program, and whether the Administration has to alter what it previously had projected as a $7.9 billion request in FY2013 depends largely on how the funding battle in Congress plays out this year. Miller said the Pentagon had previously been prepared to contribute extra budget authority to the NNSA for FY2013-2016, but he suggested that DoD officials don’t want to help pump up the NNSA’s budget request only to see it reduced by Congress—especially as it deals with its own budget issues. “What we’d like to do is get a degree of alignment with Capitol Hill so that the Administration proposes something that the Senators and members and their staff understand to be both well-grounded and sustainable over time,” Miller said. “Since we submitted the FY12 budget and the 1251 [modernization] report we don’t see anything that causes us to believe that less than the $7.6 billion dollars requested for weapons activities is what’s required.”

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