$20B Budget Would ‘Choke’ NNSA, Skeptical House Approps Cardinal Says

February 28, 2020
By Dan Leone

The National Nuclear Security Administration would not be able to spend the $20 billion it requested for fiscal 2021, and so will have to make do with a more “realistic” budget, the House of Representatives’ lead appropriator for the Department of Energy said Thursday.

“On the nuclear weapons side, you don’t choke a government agency by giving them more than they can actually digest,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), chair of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, told reporters after hearing testimony from Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette on his agency’s $35.4 billion request for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. “The proposed legislation does that for the department. We’re going to do something more realistic.”

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) seeks a roughly $20 billion budget for 2021, a 20% boost from the 2020 budget of more than $16.5 billion. 

Most of that additional money would be funneled into the Weapons Activities budget – a 25% year-over-year increase to more than $15.5 billion for the NNSA branch in charge of rebuilding the nuclear weapons production complex and refurbishing nuclear weapons.

Brouillette, as he had done before, defended the NNSA’s request as “appropriate,” telling Kaptur and her colleagues on the subcommittee that he turned in the budget that President Donald Trump prefers for the civilian nuclear weapons complex. The DOE chief side-stepped a loaded question from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) about why he had initially supported a $17.5 billion request for the NNSA.

The Dispatch digital publication in January reported that Brouillette initially spiked the NNSA’s $20-billion budget request for fear that the White House Office of Management and Budget would never support it — only to be overruled by Trump himself, who green-lit the current proposal after a meeting with influential conservative lawmakers who agreed with NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty’s call for more funding.

“Ultimately … the president gets to decide what he wants to give to Congress, and the president made a determination that he wanted to go with a higher number,” Brouillette said.

Kaptur and the subcommittee will get their chance next Wednesday to press the NNSA more directly about its budget needs, when Gordon-Hagerty is slated to testify before the lawmakers who write the first draft of the agency’s annual spending bill.

Meanwhile, Kaptur, like her counterpart on the House Armed Services Committee days before, said she was concerned that the NNSA is sitting on some $8 billion of unspent appropriations from 2019. The chairwoman said that pile of cash itself is proof that the agency has already bitten off more than it can chew from the Treasury.

“[T]he fact that they’re a little bit behind tells us that, again, we can’t choke them with money that’ll just sit there,” Kaptur told reporters. “We have to develop a budget that can be realistically accomplished in the nuclear modernization.”

An NNSA spokesperson, in a statement ahead of Thursday’s appropriations hearing, said most of the $8 billion in carry-over funding from fiscal 2019 was earmarked for existing weapons life-extension and construction operations. A fraction, some $340 million, was unobligated.

Most of the carry-over funds are in the Directed Stockpile program, the spokesperson said, where they help pay the bills for operating and expanding the NNSA nuclear weapons complex. That includes “funding nuclear warhead life extension programs, and infrastructure activities, [and] capital construction projects such as the Uranium Processing Facility” at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, the spokesperson wrote.

The agency is seeking just under $1.5 billion in 2021 to prepare its two-state plutonium pit production complex, up from some $800 million appropriated for 2020, according to the detailed budget justification the agency released Wednesday.

That is in addition to the roughly $250 million the NNSA seeks for other construction projects, including uranium and lithium processing facilities. The agency is requesting about $1.4 billion for the construction portion of its infrastructure and operations budget for 2021, up from more than $1 billion in 2020.

For the Uranium Processing Facility, the NNSA requested $750 million for 2021, up from $745 million in 2020. For the planned Lithium Processing Facility at Y-12, which will produce that non-nuclear metal for use in nuclear warheads and bombs, the NNSA seeks nearly $110 million, rising from $32 million in 2020.

Since the Barack Obama administration started the current 30-year nuclear modernization program in 2016, DOE and Congress have known the program’s costs will peak later this decade as a result of these, and many other, initiatives deemed necessary to maintain through most of the 21st century a nuclear arsenal capable of deterring potential adversaries from attacking the U.S. homeland.

Nevertheless, as activities around the NNSA nuclear enterprise ramp up, lawmakers are calling for debate about the costs.

The House Armed Services Committee is so concerned that it devoted plenty of air time to the NNSA in a Wednesday hearing that did not even include any witnesses from the Department of Energy.

The White House’s controversial plan to raise the NNSA’s budget would use money from the Pentagon – meaning the Navy would be able to fund fund only a single Virginia-class attack submarine in fiscal 2021, rather than the pair the service wanted.

Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), in the budget hearing with Pentagon leaders, wondered why the NNSA should raid the Navy shipbuilding account when the civilian agency is already sitting on a pile of unspent cash.

“If we got $8 billion hanging out in there that we haven’t spent as planned, I question the wisdom of grabbing $2.5 billion to add to that,” he said.

The ranking Republican on the committee, however, went on the defense for the NNSA.

“I think it’s up to us to dig deeper into exactly where those [unspent NNSA] funds come from,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas.) said during the hearing. “Are they intended for a particular purpose? A construction project that’s delayed? A weapon refurbishment for example, that’s been delayed, and I know we’ve got some of that.”

One Virginia Sub is Sub-Optimal for Pentagon Leaders

At the hearing, both Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley were cool to the plan to clip a Virginia sub from the budget.

“[M]y gut tells me we need more attack submarines than planned,” Esper testified.

Asked by Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.) whether he thought it was “good prioritization” to cut a Virginia-class submarine to lift the NNSA budget, Milley said, “no, it is not, ma’am.”

The Navy is starting to build Block V Virginia-class submarines: the latest iteration of the attack vessel that replaces Los Angeles-class boats. These attack submarines are nuclear powered, but do not carry nuclear weapons. In December, the Navy gave General Dynamics Electric Boat a $22.2 billion contract to build nine Virginia-class subs by 2029, with an option for a 10th boat.

On Wednesday, Esper and Milley offered ways to lessen the financial blow to the Navy’s shipbuilding program, and showed some support for the civilian weapons complex.

Esper proposed that Congress let the Navy sweep up unspent funds from non-shipbuilding accounts at the end of the a fiscal year and transfer them into the service’s Shipbuilding and Conversion budget. That would recoup at least some of the money the White House wants to send to the NNSA.

“We think that could generate at least $1 billion a year or so that we could plunge back into ship building,” Esper said. “[T]hat’s something that other departments of the federal government already have available to them,” he added, without referencing the NNSA.