The House Rules Committee was set Tuesday to decide which amendments to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, including several related to nuclear weapons, will reach the full House for debate on Wednesday.
The committee was set to meet at 12:00 a.m. Eastern time. There were more than 1,000 amendments pending to the annual must-pass bill, which sets policy and spending limits for defense programs, including those at the Department of Energy. Typically, the rules committee axes many of these before sending the bill to the floor.
Among the nuclear weapons amendments filed were broad proposals to limit funding for the planned Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile fleet set to replace the Minuteman III fleet starting in 2030 or so, plus some smaller, more targeted amendments touching among other things on the W80-4 air-launched cruise missile warhead.
The big debate over the next two days, however, appeared to be whether House Democrats as a bloc would vote to roll back a proposed defense-spending increase packed on a bipartisan basis into the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by the House Armed Services Committee in June.
A rollback would undo proposed funding increases for DOE’s nuclear weapons and waste programs, leaving some of these programs authorized to spend less money in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 than the White House requested.
As it stood Tuesday morning, the Armed Services Committee’s 2023 NDAA would authorize about $22 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), or $1 billion more than what House appropriators approved in a separate bill due for a vote next week.
For nuclear-weapons cleanup at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the NDAA authorizes approximately the requested funding.
