Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
12/11/2015
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) internal estimates for the long-term cost of nuclear weapons modernization operations exceed by over $4 billion President Barack Obama’s projections in the fiscal 2016 annual DOE and Department of Defense (DoD) joint report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a report released Thursday.
The GAO said the joint report’s five-year nuclear weapons and infrastructure sustainment and modernization cost projections for the DOE are “generally consistent” with the department’s Future Years Nuclear Security Program (FYNSP) internal funding plan, but while the DOE’s estimate for fiscal 2021 to 2025 is $56.4 billion, the president’s budget estimate is a total $52.2 billion, $4.2 billion less than the DOE’s calculation.
The GAO said that according to a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) official, the longer-term estimates “have not undergone the same programming scrutiny” as the near-term estimates; moreover, “there is a high level of uncertainty in the budget estimates beyond the FYNSP, which makes planning beyond 5 years difficult.”
The GAO also found “several instances where NNSA’s budget estimates for major modernization efforts may not fully align with cost range estimates for each life extension program” and could lead to funding shortfalls for certain programs. For example, in the case of the B61-12 life extension program, “the low cost range estimate of $195 million for the final year of production in fiscal year 2025 exceeds the budget estimate of $64 million,” the GAO said. In response, it added, NNSA officials noted life-extension programs could carry over funds from year to year in the event of a funding shortfall.
The DoD and DOE joint report for fiscal 2016 nuclear sustainment and modernization plans estimated a $336.5 billion budget requirement from fiscal 2016 to 2025, which was later corrected to $319.8 billion following an error in the 10-year cost estimate for the Long-Range Strike Bomber. The DoD is responsible for paying 68 percent of this figure, and the DOE for 32 percent, or $103.5 billion. This number is a 3.4 percent increase over the DOE’s fiscal 2015 joint report estimate, part of which “is due to an increase in the budget estimates for some individual programs,” the audit found.
The GAO noted that in the 2016 DoD-DOE report, both agencies “continued to omit thorough descriptions of the methodologies they used to develop the budget estimates” and neglected to include “comparative information on changes in budget estimates from the previous year.” The GAO in a July 2015 report recommended that the agencies address these issues by documenting budget estimate methodologies and changes, and reiterated that suggestion in the most recent report. It said the DoD and DOE both agreed to address the recommendations in future joint reports.
