The Los Alamos Study Group and Nuclear Watch New Mexico published separate statements this week criticizing the Donald Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 request for an increase in funding plutonium pit production and decrease to nonproliferation and non-weapons science programs.
“Throughout this budget it is global dominance, not global cooperation, that is the stated theme. U.S. dominance was always more or less the goal no matter what was said… now it is the explicit goal,” Greg Mello, director of Los Alamos Study Group, said in a press release April 3. “Not just NNSA’s warhead work but also NNSA’s nonproliferation and arms control work are now explicitly oriented toward global dominance.”
On April 3, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget released a high-level budget proposal for fiscal 2027 that requested $32.8 billion, 12% more than fiscal 2026, for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous agency in charge of maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
While the White House’s request mainly listed toplines, the DOE released a Budget in Brief document that justified the White House’s toplines and also went into detail about subsections. The details include funding for each of the labs and a 35% increase to weapons activities, or its programs for producing parts of the nuclear warheads, bringing it up to $27.4 billion. It also included an 83% increase in production of the fissile core of the nuclear weapon, or the plutonium pit, bringing it up to $2.4 billion for fiscal 2027 if enacted.
On April 4, Mello in a different statement added, “New information from many sources tell us that the ever-rising costs at LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] are not just cost overruns but also increases in scale, in line with recent Trump Administration directives… There has been no environmental impact statement applicable to this increased mission, and no accountability for past failures.”