The House Armed Service’s starting version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would authorize $25.4 billion to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and establish a New Advanced Nuclear Energy Working Group.
The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) will mark up the bill at 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, July 15 in Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2118.
The House would allow the NNSA to spend almost $200 million more than the White House requested in the fiscal 2026 budget.
The topline is $893 billion, which matches President Donald Trump’s discretionary request and would be 14% greater than fiscal 2025. With the newly passed reconciliation bill, if the NDAA is passed that would mean $1.04 trillion authorized for defense spending in fiscal 2026.
The bill’s starting text also includes a section that would codify NNSA’s two-site strategy for producing plutonium pits. The two locations are Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. By April 2026, the Nuclear Weapons Council would be required to brief HASC on setting pit production rate and schedule requirements and align them with an updated assessment of DoD’s needs.
Senior Congressional officials Friday cited Trump’s executive order on expanding nuclear energy. This came when the officials were asked by reporters about the New Advanced Nuclear Energy Working Group in both Senate and House versions of the bill at a virtual press background briefing,
“The Department has been working for a while now on on on expanding its energy production means, and they’ve been looking at things like small, portable nuclear reactors, because it is very, very expensive and logistically a real pain to get diesel and out to… operating bases and out to remote locations and in the Indo Pacific and northern Alaska to sustain operations on our bases,” an official said. “So you know, one of the things that we’re excited about doing in this bill is furthering that small, portable nuclear reactor effort by establishing a program of record and forcing the department to coordinate all the research and all the ideas for deployment.”
At the Senate background briefing, senior congressional officials said “the working group is a way to try to create a structure within the department to align senior officials to help promote and coordinate all the various activities.”