Jill Hruby was scheduled for a 1:30 p.m. confirmation vote in the Senate Thursday that would install the ex-Sandia National Laboratories director as head of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Hruby would be the sixth Senate-confirmed administrator of the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the part of the Department of Energy responsible for nuclear-weapons maintenance, refurbishment and testing. She would also be the second woman to lead the agency. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the last full-time administrator, was the first.
If confirmed Thursday, Hruby’s nomination will have taken three months to get through the Senate.
That’s about a month more than the average wait time of the five previous NNSA administrators. It is also, by a matter of days, the longest any NNSA administrator designate will have waited in the chamber in the agency’s roughly 20-year history. Linton Brooks, the third and longest-serving NNSA administrator to date, took two months and 28 days to clear the Senate.
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved Hruby’s nomination on June 10, two weeks after her confirmation hearing on May 27. At deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, the full Senate had not scheduled a vote for Hruby’s deputy-designate, Frank Rose. The Armed Services Committee vetted Rose’s nomination in the same hearing as Hruby’s and advanced his nomination to the Senate floor the same day.
Last week, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) lifted a hold on Hruby’s floor vote, clearing the way for Thursday’s scheduled vote.
If confirmed, Hruby will take the tiller as the NNSA simultaneously prepares to build a pair of plutonium pit production factories and perform overlapping refurbishes of two of the six deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal: the B61 gravity bomb and the W88 submarine-launched nuclear warhead.
The U.S. nuclear weapons production complex has not faced a workload like that since the end of the Cold War, and there’s more on the way.
After the B61 and W88 refurbs are out of the pipe, the NNSA will begin refurbishing the W80 air-launched cruise missile warhead and the W87 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead. The latter will be the first in decades to be fitted with freshly made plutonium pits, to be cast at the planned factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
