The National Nuclear Security Administration’s fiscal year 2023 budget request includes everything permitted by the Joe Biden administration’s as-yet unpublished nuclear posture review, the Secretary of Energy said Wednesday in written testimony prepared for her first scheduled congressional budget hearing of the season.
The nuclear-weapons steward’s 2023 request of $21.4 billion is around 3.5% higher than the 2022 appropriation, about 1.5% higher than what the Donald Trump administration predicted the agency would need for the coming year, and includes almost everything that the Trump administration called for its own nuclear posture review.
The request “is fully informed by the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in written testimony prepared for her scheduled appearance before the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee.
Granholm was scheduled to testify before appropriators on Thursday at 2:30 p.m., a few hours after a scheduled appearance before the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee.
The White House has circulated a classified version of the nuclear posture review on Capitol Hill and released a one-page summary of the document publicly, but the administration had not as of Wednesday afternoon published the full, unclassified review.
But Granholm’s testimony, and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) detailed budget request for its weapons programs, reveal a number of things about the review, including that the Biden administration is sticking by the agency’s plan to produce the plutonium cores of nuclear-weapon first stages in a pair of planned factories: one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and another at the Savannah River Site.
At $4.6 billion, NNSA’s 2023 budget request for modernization of its plutonium-pit infrastructure is higher than the 2022 appropriation by some 60%, or $1.7 billion. It is also much higher than the Donald Trump administration predicted in 2020 that NNSA would need for pits during the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
The NNSA budget request also shows that the Biden nuclear posture review includes explicit cuts to few weapons programs, with the planned sea-launched, nuclear-tipped cruise missile, or SLCM-N, and the B83 gravity bomb bearing the brunt.