If, with a herculean effort, you put the COVID-19 pandemic to one side, the biggest story of 2020 at the National Nuclear Security Administration was how semi-autonomous it really is from the Department of Energy, and how much control the Department of Defense should have over it.
The debate is in a sense older than the 20 year-old National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which came into being generations after Congress did away with the Atomic Energy Commission and created the Department of Energy during the Carter administration.
But seldom has the debate raged so bitterly and so publicly as it did this year: one in which the Administrator of the NNSA and the secretary of energy were already feuding over the size of the weapons-agency’s budget in early January.
Now ex-NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon Hagerty got her way in that argument, and she and her boss, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, spent a few pre-lockdown hearings on Capitol Hill insisting that the spat over the weapons budget was part of the usual intra-agency process.
Lawmakers who heard that testimony did not trip over themselves to agree with that characterization of the debate, which according to a bombshell report from the conservative publication The Dispatch spilled out of DOE headquarters and into the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, where lawmakers eventually got hold of a leaked copy of an 11-page memo from Gordon-Hagerty to Ellen Lord, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment.
In the memo, Gordon-Hagerty said Brouillette’s proposed budget of $17.5 billion would delay crucial nuclear-weapon rollouts slated for 2030 and beyond, and that only a $20 billion budget would do to meet those commitments.
Gordon-Hagerty got her $20 billion budget request, but Brouillette got Gordon-Hagerty’s resignation some 10 months later after — as the ExchangeMonitor exclusively learned — putting a tight leash on Gordon-Hagerty’s movements about Washington, and tracking her personal calendar to ultimately request her dismissal while she was away from work on personal leave.
By the time Gordon-Hagerty turned in her resignation, Congress had split into camps about how much control warring interagency factions should and shouldn’t have over the NNSA.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Armed Services chair who led a delegation to the White House to lobby for Gordon-Hagerty’s budget request in January, wanted to give the Pentagon a veto power over the DOE’s annual budget request for the NNSA.
Inhife’s colleagues in the Senate would not tolerate that idea. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) became the standard bearer in the upper chamber, arguing that if the Pentagon could set NNSA’s budget and not pay for it, DOE-funded cleanup of shuttered nuclear-weapons production sites would suffer. The Hanford Site in eastern Washington is the biggest of those cleanup projects, which are managed by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management.
Over in the House, the Energy and Commerce Committee flexed its muscles this year, approving by voice vote a bill that would have placed employees of the NNSA under the secretary of energy’s control. The bill never made it to the House floor, and the House Armed Services Committee would get a say in such a radical policy change before the whole House.
The Energy and Commerce measure infuriated Inhofe, who said that it would sabotage the NNSA’s ability to meet military commitments by allowing the secretary of energy to influence federal employees who, under current law, report only to the NNSA administrator. After the bill cleared the House committee in September, Inhofe accused people in the DOE of working to “destroy the NNSA’s congressionally mandated independence.”
Only after Gordon-Hagerty’s resignation did Inhofe start dropping names, complaining in a public statement that Brouillette’s personnel move at last proved that the secretary “doesn’t know what he’s doing in national security matters.”
As it stood at deadline for 2020’s final issue of Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, the NNSA will roll in to calendar year 2021 much the same as it has been for the past two decades: semi-autonomy intact, and only the administrator — among thousands NNSA support employees — reporting to the secretary of energy.
What could change, if President Donald Trump signs the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, or if Congress overrides his promised veto of that bill, is that the Pentagon’s Nuclear Weapons Council would each year get to say whether it believed the DOE’s requested budget for the NNSA is adequate.
If the council thinks the budget isn’t adequate, Congress would get a notification to that effect when the White House releases the annual federal budget request, nominally in early February. At that point, Congress would be free to do what it always does: fund or disregard the request, to the extent that the votes allow.
Two weeks before Christmas, an old NNSA hand, also a former assistant secretaries of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, urged Congress to promote close ties between the NNSA and the Pentagon.
“I’ve looked with such disappointment at some in Congress who are arguing that we should try to separate or keep the Department of Energy activities away from the Department of Defense,” John Harvey, the ex-NNSA and Pentagon official, told a virtual audience Dec. 10 during the Nuclear Triad Symposium hosted by the Washington-based Cyber Innovation Center, a non-government group. An “NNSA and DOD that are tightly linked, where the requirements process is fully adopted and connected together with the guys who produce the components at the Department of Defense, really is terribly critical.
“And I have to give Ms. Gordon-Hagerty enormous credit over the last three years in advancing this relationship,” Harvey said.
2020, The List
The year now ending was not the busiest for NNSA, and despite the deaths of five agency employees due to COVID-19 — of which the agency had tracked more than 2,000 confirmed cases at deadline — the pandemic struck about a year before the agency will be on the hook to begin back-to-back nuclear weapon refurbishments at a massive scale.
As far as the agency had owned at deadline, the pandemic has not delayed the first production unit dates for the W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warhead or the B61-12 gravity bomb. Those are expected in July 2021 and November 2021, respectively.
Here are some other major NNSA milestones from 2020:
Production site contract back on the street. In June, fulfilling rumors that had swirled at least since February, the NNSA decided it would not pick up further options on Consolidated Nuclear Security’s contract to manage the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The incumbent will stick around under the new contractor to finish building the Uranium Processing Facility — by 2025, the NNSA says. Meanwhile, the agency plans to transition to the new contractor in June 2021. NS&D Monitor took a look at the competitive landscape for the nearly $30-billion follow-on contract in October.
Record-shattering settlement over plutonium in South Carolina. Just before the presidential election, the federal government settled a long-running lawsuit brought by the state of South Carolina over DOE’s failure to start disposing of weapons-usable plutonium using the now-cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site. Under the terms of the settlement, the agency has to remove 9.5 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium from Savannah River Site from South Carolina by 2037. The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, meanwhile, was rechristened the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility and will be turned into a factory to cast new plutonium pits, fissile weapon cores, by 2030, the NNSA hopes.
New submarine-launched ballistic-warhead teased, not funded. In its 2021 budget request, the NNSA sought a little over $50 million for early work on what it called a W93 warhead: a weapon that would ride in a proposed Mark 7 aeroshell aboard whatever missile replaces the Trident II D5s now carried aboard the Navy’s ballistic missile submarines. At deadline, Congress had not agreed to provide those funds. The United Kingdom, which also uses Trident missiles and U.S.-designed warheads, has said the holdup on W93 is hurting the Kingdom’s nuclear modernization plans.
Industry consolidation didn’t happen, after all. Los Angeles-based AECOM, a longtime DOE nuclear contractor, completed the sale of its nuclear-related government contracting division in January to a pair of New York investment firms that rechristened the operation Amentum. It was a wash, as far as competition goes: one company exits, another takes its place. Meanwhile, Fluor, the Irving, Texas-based engineering and construction corporation, in February called off a sale of its government contracting unit announced in September 2019.
More tritium, soon. In October, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear reactor shut down for refueling. When it switches back on, it will contain tritium producing burnable absorber rods provided by the NNSA. Irradiating the rods, as Watts Bar Unit 1 has done for years, will provide the NNSA with the tritium it needs to carry out the mad rush of nuclear-weapon refurbishments planned over the coming decades.