The House and Senate on Wednesday reached a compromise on this year’s defense authorization legislation, though the fate of a couple Department of Energy nuclear programs remained unknown at deadline Wednesday.
What was known came from congressional summaries of the massive bill report that will accompany the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act to President Donald Trump’s desk. For example: The legislation would authorize just under $60 million for “a research and development program on a ground-launched intermediate-range missile,” according to a Senate press release.
Remaining to be seen was the fate of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility: the massive plant being built at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina to turn 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact finalized with Russia in 2010.
The Trump administration wants to kill the facility, but the House and Senate Armed Services committees both authorized the project to continue in fiscal 2018, which began Oct.1. Appropriators in the two chambers have split the difference, with the House backing funds to continue construction and the Senate supporting funds to close it down.
It was likewise unclear whether the reconciled bill authorized the $175 million New Mexico’s U.S. senators sought for construction of a new NNSA office building in Albuquerque, N.M. The Senate’s version of the bill authorized the spending, and the Department of Energy has started gathering information to support an eventual procurement.
Those details would be part of the final bill report, which had not been published at deadline Wednesday.
The House and Senate Armed Services committees had authorized differing versions of a new ground-launched cruise-missile program in bills written over the summer in response to Russia’s violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Moscow is believed to have tested and deployed a weapon that breaches the 1987 accord that prohibits the fielding of ground-based cruise and ballistic missiles with flight ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
The cruise-missile program approved in the latest defense authorization act “would not place the United States in violation of the treaty,” according to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Donald Trump administration, in statements of administration policy published this summer, said it was wary of any defense authorization bill language that would force the White House into a specific program. That said, the administration did not shut the door altogether on R&D that might lead to a new ground-launched cruise missile.
