Three months of frozen budgets is probably no big deal for the National Nuclear Security Administration and its portfolio of 21st-century weapons-production construction, but a year’s worth would be bad news, a senior official said recently.
“We’re inoculated for a period of about a quarter,” Bob Raines, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) associate administrator for acquisition and project management, said at a webcast hosted Oct. 29 by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance, a pair of D.C.-area on-government groups. “If it’s the whole year, we’ll be in trouble. We’re putting together an anomaly request of how we would like the Congress, even under a [continuing resolution] to realign funds.”
An anomaly is when an agency asks congressional appropriations committees for permission to spend money in a way other than current law allows. Congress sometimes packs anomalies into continuing resolutions, but more often, it does not.
The NNSA spends each summer and winter figuring out how to keep novel, long-term, multibillion-dollar construction and engineering projects funded on a year-to-year budget, and Congress routinely fails to heed those funding requests in a timely way, instead passing a short-term funding appropriations that extend the prior year’s budget into all or part of another fiscal year — whether the old budget is a good fit for the new year or not.
This year’s short-term stop-gap, or continuing resolution, stretched 2020 budgets into Dec. 11, or about a full fiscal quarter.
NNSA’s Production Modernization account gets badly shortchanged under a continuing resolution, compared with what the agency says it needs for this year. The account funds construction of infrastructure the agency will depend on to make nuclear-weapons primary and secondary stages for much of the rest of the 21st century.
NNSA requested nearly $2.5 billion for Production Modernization in 2021. The stopgap holds the many programs in the account to the annualized level of about $1.5 billion. Within the total, programs to make plutonium pits, fissile nuclear-weapon cores for primary stages, face shortfalls, compared with the request.
The NNSA is preparing to make pits for future W87-1 intercontinental ballistic warheads at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site. The continuing resolution shorts the more-urgently needed Los Alamos facilities, which NNSA wants to make war-usable pits starting in 2024, even more than the planned Savannah River facility, which NNSA wants to start casting pits in 2030.
NNSA sought some $840 for Los Alamos Plutonium Modernization in 2021 and gets the equivalent of $308 million under the continuing resolution. For the Savannah River pit plant, the NNSA asked for just over $440 million in 2021 and gets the equivalent of $410 million, under the stopgap.