Released midday Tuesday, the Senate Armed Service’s version of the 2024 defense policy bill boosts spending on nuclear weapons by $276 million and increases overall funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration, compared with the agency’s funding request.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Ranking Member Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) jointly announced filing of the panel’s version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill would authorize total NNSA spending of an even $24 billion or so, up from $23.8 billion in the Biden Administration’s initial request for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
The bill, which now heads to the full Senate for debate, “addresses a broad range of pressing issues, from strategic competition with China and Russia, to disruptive technologies like hypersonics, AI, and quantum computing, to modernizing our ships, aircraft, and combat vehicles,” Reed said in a statement.
Wicker said the legislation, as agreed to by the committee “includes many key provisions to maintain deterrence and modernize our armed forces. I am hopeful that the Senate will consider other improvements, including a topline increase for the Department of Defense. Adequate funding of our security needs would be a powerful show of resolve to our adversaries.”
Department Of Energy weapons activities overseen by the NNSA got a boost of $276 million to $19.1 billion in the Senate committee’s version of the bill, up from $18.8 billion in the 2024 request.
The committee boosted total spending on nuclear stockpile modernization by $75 million from the administration’s fiscal 2024 request, to just over $5.27 billion. That $75 million would go to development of a version of the W80-4 warhead that would ride on a controversial nuclear sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCMN. The missile itself received another $190 million plus-up in the committee’s bill through the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons Development Program.
The Senate committee’s bill requires that both the Defense Department’s nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile program and W80-4 Warhead development program reach initial operational capability by fiscal year 2035.
The majority of SASC-approved increases for NNSA weapons programs are for various National Laboratory efforts that develop or test nuclear components and their potential yields if deployed.
The Energetic Materials Characterization Facility at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in New Mexico would receive $19 million under the committee’s version of the NDAA, instead of nothing in the next fiscal year. That program would support the High Explosive Synthesis, Formulation, and Production Facility at the Pantex Plant in Texas, which would get $110 million under the Senate’s bill, where nothing was requested in the NNSA’s initial funding request.
Both program restarts are preserving “conventional high explosives manufacturing … for the unique conventional high explosives used at the NNSA,” according to a fact sheet about the Senate committee’s version of the bill.
Inertial confinement fusion, the catchall for high-energy experiments performed at National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, the Z-Machine at Sandia National Laboratories and elsewhere got an additional $40 million to $641 million in the committee’s bill, up from $601 million in the fiscal 2024 request. The facilities respectively use lasers and magnetic fields to test materials under nuclear-explosion-like conditions.
Advanced simulation and computing, used to simulate the performance of nuclear weapons without resorting to nuclear explosions, would receive a $10 million funding increase from the Senate, up to $792.4 million from $782.4 million in the request.
A project at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee to reduce the circumference of the perimeter fence, allowing security to patrol a smaller area for potential intruders, would get $10 million more than requested from the Senate’s bill, which authorizes $38 million.
As with the House version of the NDAA, the bill cuts a small amount from DOE nuclear nonproliferation programs. Congress’ upper chamber decided to shave $25 million from the NNSA’s Bioassurance Program.
