House, Senate NDAAs both want much more for South Carolina pits

July 21, 2022

By Exchange Monitor

The Senate Armed Services Committee this week released all the unclassified details of its fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, showing lawmakers in that chamber disagree with their House counterparts on little except by how much to exceed the White House’s request for construction of a new plutonium pit factory in South Carolina.

The committee wants to authorize $1.25 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, according to the report accompanying the committee’s version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The full House’s NDAA, approved last week by the full chamber, would provide about $1.13 billion. The Senate committee’s proposal beats the White House request by about $500 million, the House’s by about $375 million. NNSA and Pentagon officials this spring urged the Armed Services Committees not to overfund the request for the planned factory, but Congress has now laid those recommendations aside.

Overall, each 2023 NDAA proposes about $22 billion for the NNSA. The House NDAA would give the agency more than the Senate committee’s NDAA: some $725 million more than requested, compared with about $590 million more.

Most of the extra funding authorized by the House NDAA would be for NNSA’s Stockpile Research, Technology, and Engineering program. The House authorization is some $250 million higher than requested. The Senate Armed Services Committee did not go along with the House’s nuclear-weapons R&D funding bonanza, though it did approve about $50 million more than the request.

The Senate had not scheduled floor debate for its NDAA, which sets policy and funding limits for defense programs for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Authorization bills such as the NDAA are separate from appropriations bills that actually provide funding from the treasury.

Meanwhile, the House on Wednesday passed its version of the Department of Energy’s 2023 budget bill, part of an energy and water development appropriations act that was itself one of six appropriations bills bundled into a so-called minibus package.

The bill provides less funding than requested for the NNSA for fiscal year 2023 and only the Joe Biden administration’s requested funding for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility: about $758 million.

The Senate Appropriations Committee planned to publish its appropriations bills by the end of July. That would leave only about a month, considering Congress’ annual August recess, to reconcile differences in the appropriations bills before the government fiscal calendar flips to 2023.