The House and Senate approved their respective versions of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act with bipartisan votes this week, supporting the Trump administration’s requested funding for nuclear-weapon operations at the Department of Energy. However, President Donald Trump threatened to veto the measure over provisions including production of plutonium warhead cores and removing Confederate iconography from government property.
On Friday, a day after the Senate passed its version of the bill 86-14, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chamber’s Armed Services chair, said he wanted to remove the provisions of the bill that require removing Confederate symbolism. He did not provide details.
Both bills had such provisions, and each measure passed its respective chamber with a nominally veto-proof margin.
The House passed its bill 295-125 on Tuesday. Among those voting “aye” were Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the retiring ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee; Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), ranking member of the panel’s strategic forces subcommittee; and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a prominent figure and fundraiser among House Republicans who is among the conference’s most hawkish.
In a statement of administration policy, the White House criticized a provision of the annual military policy bill that would require an independent cost study of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) planned plutonium-pit factory at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. If the secretary of energy is not at least 90% confident in the cost estimate produced, she or he would have to come up with a new plan for building the facility.
The administration said the study is “unnecessary,” because the agency’s acquisition rules for major construction projects already call for multiple cost estimates sometimes from NNSA offices that are independent of any specific project.
The bill would prohibit the NNSA from using its fiscal 2021 budget to make any preparation for a yield-producing nuclear-weapon test. It also would add the secretaries of energy and defense to the joint Pentagon-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council: the government’s specialized shop that coordinates the two agency’s nuclear-arms acquisitions, and which already includes senior deputies of these two Cabinet officials.
Those two House provisions are at odds with language in the Senate’s version of the annual military policy bill, which it passsed Thursday in an 86-14 vote. The Senate’s bill has money to prepare for explosive weapons tests and would increase the existing Nuclear Weapons Council’s sway over the NNSA’s annual budget request.
Overall, the House bill would authorize the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency to spend some $20 billion in fiscal 2021, which begins Oct. 1. That is about 20% more than the 2020 budget of over $16.5 billion. However, the House Appropriations Committee’s 2021 DOE budget bill, approved last week and scheduled for floor debate next week, provides roughly $18 billion for the NNSA.
The ban on yield tests, by Rep. Ben McAdams (D-Utah), was added to the House bill in an amendment that passed 227-179 on a mostly party-line vote. The change to the Nuclear Weapons Council was part of an en bloc package that passed 336-71. Both amendments were approved Monday.
The Senate NDAA authorizes $10 million to prepare if necessary to perform a yield-producing nuclear-weapons test.
“We want to make it clear it’s not a good idea to do live nuclear testing,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said during Monday floor debate. “We do not need to be setting off nuclear weapons.”
In May, The Washington Post reported that the Donald Trump administration was considering a rapid nuclear-explosive test as a means of persuading Russia and China to negotiate a trilateral nuclear arms-control treaty with the U.S.
The ultra-hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) subsequently proposed a modest set-aside for explosive test readiness in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s NDAA. There is no central account for that purpose within the NNSA, but there are funds scattered throughout the enterprise to at least appraise what it would take to return to a yield-test regime.
The United States has not performed a nuclear explosive test since 1992, instead relying on subcritical and other plutonium tests that produce no sustained fission chain-reaction.
Meanwhile, the Senate’s NDAA would allow the Nuclear Weapons Council to make formal budget recommendations to the secretary of energy about the National Nuclear Security Administration’s annual budget requests. The secretary of energy would then have to pass that on to the White House before the president shares a final federal budget request with Congress.
The Senate Armed Services Committee originally wanted to go further than that. The bill the panel produced for its colleagues’ consideration on the floor would have given the Nuclear Weapons Council a sort of veto power over the secretary of energy’s budget recommendation for the NNSA each year. If the council, led by the Pentagon’s undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, thought the NNSA budget was too low, it could essentially have directed the secretary of energy to voost the request before sharing the budget with the White House. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) helped excise that language from the bill, with an amendment approved unanimously by the chamber on July 2.
The proposed reforms for formulating the civilian nuclear-weapons budget followed a winter in which NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty proposed a major increase for the budget request on the basis of a study the agency conceived of independently and performed on itself. The study, Gordon-Hagerty said in congressional testimony, showed the NNSA’s part of the ongoing modernization plan was underfunded by billions.
Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette did not want to include Gordon-Hagerty’s preferred number, but the White House eventually sided with the NNSA, after influential Republican lawmakers made the case for the bigger budget.
