The White House shouted its objection to the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility and reseearch on a new intermediate-range missile system in a statement of administration policy Thursday.
The measures are part of the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2018, which the upper chamber plans to take up next week now that it has gotten the latest government funding crisis temporarily off its plate with a continuing resolution passed this week.
The Senate’s 2018 NDAA would again authorize construction funding for the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication facility at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site. The facility is being built to turn 34 metric tons of nuclear weapons-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors under a 2000 arms-control agreement with Russia.
The Donald Trump administration, like the Barack Obama administration before it, wants MOX dead. Instead, White House wants to dillute the plutonium and immobilize the resulting material in concrete-like grout for burial at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
“[T]he project is unaffordable and risky,” the Trump administration wrote of MOX in the statement of administration policy.
For fiscal 2018, a DOE spending bill that cleared the House in July would keep MOX going. The 2018 DOE budget bill the Senate Appropriations Committee approved that month would provide $270 million to close out the project.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration also bristled Thursday about what it characterized as the Senate NDAA’s unnecessarily specific plan to develop an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty range ground-launched missile system.
“This provision unhelpfully ties the Administration to a specific type of missile system and funding requirements, which would limit potential military response options,” the White House wrote. “The Administration would support broad authorization of research and development on missile systems, including those prohibited by the treaty, to determine candidate systems that could become programs of record.”
The U.S. in 2014 said Russia breached the 1987 INF Treaty, which prohibits the fielding of ground-based cruise and ballistic missiles with flight ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. The House’s 2018 NDAA would authorize construction of a missile system within the range prohibited by the treaty, while the NDAA the Senate is preparing to debate would authorize $65 million for a research and development program for a dual-capable, road-mobile, ground-launched missile system within the prohibited range.
The White House said it did not want the program pigeonholed that way in part because “the Administration is currently developing an integrated diplomatic, military, and economic response strategy to maximize pressure on Russia” for the alleged treaty violations.
The White House used similar language when it criticized the House’s version of the annual NDAA in another statement of administration policy in July. The administration has not threatened to veto either the House or Senate version of the bill just yet and indicated that it looked forward to working with Congress on changes.
Authorization bills are expressions of congressional policy and do not actually provide any funding, as appropriations bills do. Authorization bills are viewed as guidelines, if not gospel, by appropriators.
