Watchers of the Department of Energy’s defense nuclear waste and weapons budgets will endure another week of added uncertainty about those programs after Congress blew town for an extended spring break without making progress on a deal to avert automatic spending cuts that will kick in on Oct. 1.
The House did make an opening gambit of sorts before leaving Washington, D.C., passing a resolution with non-binding budget caps that at least least let the lower chamber’s appropriators write budget bills — bills that the majority may need to fight its own left-leaning progressive caucus to pass.
In a resolution passed last week, the House told its appropriators to mark up fiscal 2020 spending bills with a defense spending cap of about $730 billion and a non-defense spending cap of $630 billion. Those are, respectively, 2% less and 10% more than the White House seeks for those broad categories of federal spending.
Most DOE nuclear programs are part of the defense discretionary spending category. These include the nuclear weapons programs managed by the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and most of the cleanup of former nuclear weapons sites managed by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management (EM).
For DOE’s defense-nuclear programs, the White House proposed an 8% increase for the NNSA, to about $16.5 billion, and a 10% cut for EM budget, to under $6.5 billion. Under the House plan, those budgets would compete with each other, and the entire Pentagon budget, for almost $20 billion less funding than the Trump administration asked Congress to make available.
Congress will not return to work until April 29, but media have reported that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) directed their staff to start hashing out a compromise on spending caps.
Without a deal on budget caps, Congress might be forced to pass another continuing resolution that would pinch major construction projects across the weapons complex and the nuclear security enterprise. But even a deal on caps will require the White House’s support to avert a stopgap spending bill in October.
A stopgap would come at an in opportune time for major stockpile construction and warhead life-extension projects for which NNSA seeks funding increases these this. These include:
- The Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for which NNSA seeks $745 million in 2020: 6%, or $42 million, higher than the 2019 budget. The requested increase, which NNSA expected, would pay for more construction at the site, where builder Bechtel National plans to do more construction on the facility’s Main Process Building.
- The W80-4 cruise-missile warhead life-extension program, for which NNSA requested about $900 million for 2020. That is nearly $250 million more than the agency received for 2019, and 25% more funding than NNSA predicted, in last year’s budget request, that it would need for the weapon in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
- The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility. This is NNSA’s effort to convert the cancelled, and partially built, Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site into a factory to annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores a year by 2030 — most of the 80 pits NNSA needs to make that year to meet the goal of the Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. NNSA seeks $410 million for fiscal year 2020, which the agency wants to spend on design and development, but not yet construction, of the planned pit factory.
