Congress this week sent a defense authorization bill to President Donald Trump’s desk that would authorize research into a new nuclear-capable cruise missile, allow construction of a controversial plutonium processing facility the administration wants to cancel, and let the Department of Energy build a new office building for nuclear-weapons support personnel in Albuquerque.
The House approved a unified fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Tuesday, and the Senate followed suit Thursday. The bill, which Trump had not signed at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, reconciles the differing versions of the annual defense policy proposal the House and Senate produced over the summer.
Some of the legislation’s provisions buck Trump administration’s plans for the U.S. nuclear deterrent writ large, and the National Nuclear Security Administration in particular.
For instance, the latest NDAA authorizes about $340 million to construct the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. That is $70 million more than the White House requested for the budget year that began on Oct. 1 to close down the facility. The plant is intended to turn 34 metric tons of weaponizable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel to satisfy U.S. obligations under an arms control pact with Russia. However, the White House wants to back away from this approach and instead dilute the plutonium and bury it underground in New Mexico at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The NDAA also authorizes $58 million to research and develop capabilities that could allow the U.S. to field a new ground-launched cruise missile that could operate in the range prohibited by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty: a major nuclear-arms pact the U.S. says Russia has violated by testing and deploying a short-range cruise missile.
The Trump administration, in statements of administration policy released over the summer, attempted to discourage Congress from locking the executive branch into any particular cruise-missile program.
On the other hand, the NDAA authorizes exactly the $98 million that the Trump administration requested to start building a new office building for some 1,200 NNSA employees in Albuquerque, N.M.
The latest NDAA also authorizes the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to continue operating with an annual budget of just over $30 million. Board Chairman Sean Sullivan has proposed that the White House ask Congress to eliminate the independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog.
Finally, the bill attempts to lock the White House into producing plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapons, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. While the Department of Energy has not said it wants to produce pits anywhere else, New Mexico’s U.S. Senate delegation is concerned that agency is internally mulling alternatives.
Authorization bills do not actually fund federal agencies; annual appropriations bills do that. Authorization bills are generally viewed as policy guidelines and spending caps for congressional appropriations committees.
