The House Appropriations Committee late Thursday approved a bill that would give the National Nuclear Security Administration a slightly larger 2024 budget than requested, owing mostly to added funding for a plutonium pit plant being built in South Carolina.

After a lengthy markup session that ran late into the night, the committee voted 34-to-24, essentially along party lines, to send the bill to the House floor. The full House had not scheduled a vote on the bill as of deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.

House Democrats have opposed appropriations bills essentially en bloc this year because Republicans who control the chamber have limited most non-defense spending in the bills to fiscal year 2022 levels instead of the higher caps agreed to in the debt-limit deal President Joe Biden (D) cut with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the speaker of the House, in early June.

The Democrat-controlled Senate had not scheduled appropriations markups as of deadline Friday. Spending cuts prescribed in the deficit deal do not apply to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Overall in the House committee’s bill, the NNSA would receive nearly $24 billion. That’s $1.8 billion higher than the 2023 appropriation and more than $100 million above the White House’s request. The bill would fund development of a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 cruise missile warhead at $70 million, despite the Biden administration’s request, which Congress also ignored in the 2023 budget, to kill that program.

But the biggest winner in the House committee’s bill, which generally would plow money into the NNSA’s nuclear weapons programs at the expense of research and nonproliferation programs, was the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.

The plant, being built from the partially constructed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility that Congress let NNSA cancel in 2018, would receive $1.1 billion in 2024, nearly $270 million more than requested but around $73 million less than the 2023 budget. That is according to the detailed bill report the committee released this week.

NNSA is banking on the Savannah River plant to produce the lion’s share of plutonium pits, nuclear weapon cores, beginning next decade. The agency was supposed to make at least 80 pits annually starting in 2030 but because the Savannah River factory will not be ready until at least the middle of the decade, the agency has said, workloads in the first years of production will be higher.

The Savannah River pit plant’s nominal workload is at least 50 pits annually. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the NNSA’s other pit factory, will produce at least 30 pits annually in an ordinary year, according to the agency’s current plans. Los Alamos will make 30 pits a year by 2030 at least, the lab’s weapons chief told the Monitor this week during a tour of the future pit plant in New Mexico.

Congress has consistently disagreed with the Biden administration’s requests to delay funding from the Savannah River pit plant, which the White House says can make do with fewer dollars while Los Alamos ramps up for production.

Meanwhile, other weapons infrastructure programs that would get boosts under the House committee’s bill include the High Explosive Synthesis, Formulation, and Production Facility at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, the Tritium Finishing Facility at Savannah River and the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security near Oak Ridge, Tenn.

While these infrastructure programs would get more funding than sought under the committee’s bill, NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Office, which seeks to control the spread of weaponizable nuclear material around the world, would get less.

So would the Studies and Assessments line within the Engineering and Integrated Assessments portion of NNSA’s Weapons Activities budget. Among other things, these studies formulate options for new nuclear weapons that could be deployed after the weapons NNSA is modernizing now come out of service. 

Nonproliferation would receive about $2.4 billion in the House committee’s bill, nearly $130 million less than requested. Studies and Assessments, meanwhile, would get $5 million under the House committee’s bill, which is even with the 2023 budget but nearly $75 million fewer than the 2024 request.