Senate leadership is planning for the upper chamber to remain in session in October and take up the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday at a press conference
A recess had been expected in the early part of October to allow Senators to leave Washington and campaign ahead of the midterm elections.
Instead, “[w]e will be meeting in October. There’s one week we can’t meet because of the Yom Kippur holiday. But we’ll be meeting in October,” said Schumer. When the upper chamber meets, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) “will be part of what we do,” Schumer said.
The NDAA sets policy and spending limits for national security programs, including nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The full House passed its version of the fiscal 2023 NDAA in July. The Senate Armed Services Committee approved its version in June. Authorization bills are guidelines for separate appropriations bills, which actually provide money from the treasury for agencies to spend every government fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
Both chambers’ 2023 NDAAs provide more funding than requested for the NNSA. The Senate did not go along with the House’s proposed spending bonanza for NNSA’s Stockpile Research, Technology and Engineering programs, but both bills agreed that the agency should get far more than President Joe Biden requested to construction a plutonium pit factory at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s bill has about $1.25 billion for Savannah River’s pit plant, compared with about $1.13 billion in the House NDAA. The White House requested $758 million, or roughly $150 million more than the 2022 appropriation. Both NDAA versions have about $22 billion for NNSA.
Overall, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s NDAA proposed $847 billion for defense programs. That includes a $45 billion increase over President Joe Biden’s (D) request, which the committee approved during a closed-door markup. The full House’s NDAA has a total of $840 billion.
Before Biden could sign a unified NDAA into law, the two chambers would have to reconcile their competing bills in a conference committee and then get the compromise bill passed in the House and Senate. There is little time, and perhaps little political incentive, for lawmakers to approve a compromise while the two political parties fight for the votes needed to control the legislature.
