For immediate release: June 4, 2025

Albuquerque, NM -- Last Friday, May 30, the White House released a Technical Supplement to its previous "skinny budget." 

That previous budget release was the subject of our May 2 press release ("Trump administration seeks huge increase in nuclear warhead spending, the largest since 1962; Meanwhile NNSA sits on a large pile of unspent funds"), which we update here.

U.S. nuclear warheads and bombs are designed, built, upgraded, and dismantled with funds in the "Weapons Activities" portion of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA's) budget. NNSA is a semi-autonomous part of the Department of Energy.

Thanks to this new release, we can update the current (Fiscal Year 2025) Weapons Activities spending, and know how much Weapons Activities spending is proposed for FY2026.

By way of background, the FY2026 NNSA Weapons Activities work program was recently described in the joint May 20 testimony of James McConnell, Acting Principal Deputy NNSA Administrator, and Dave Hoagland, Acting Deputy NNSA Administrator for Defense Programs, before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

In short, NNSA is working on 7 warheads and bombs in various stages of design, and production, and is also attempting to renew its infrastructure for the long haul.

Here's what we now know:

The Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (Public Law 118-158, p.23), provided an additional $1.884 B to Weapons Activities in FY2025 to cover damages to NNSA sites from hurricanes Helene and Milton, "to remain available until expended." These funds -- at the time, a 10% plus-up -- were mentioned, but not tallied, in Friday's budget details, apparently because they are not part of the discretionary appropriations process.

The $4.782 billion sought for FY2026 in the reconciliation bill ("subject to PAYGO") is by far the largest part of the increase proposed for warhead spending.

Without including the $1.884 billion in FY2025 emergency funding provided, the proposed warhead budget would be a 25.0% increase over the FY25 enacted level. That would be the largest year-on-year annual increase since 1962 (i.e. since the Cuban Missile Crisis). The comparable budget figure then was $9.0 billion.

If we include last year's emergency funding, the year-on-year increase would be 17%, larger than any annual increase since 1982.

Study Group director Greg Mello:

"In our perspective there are three main problems here. The first is that NNSA has too much to do. Congress, especially, is eager to spend borrowed money on nuclear weapons projects in its respective states and congressional districts and of course the appetites of the contractors involved are unbounded. The result is an agency with an unnecessarily vast workload and correspondingly bottomless need for money.

"NNSA is almost completely privatized, so this is a profound structural problem.

"NNSA's warhead budget is rising exponentially. This proposed huge year-on-year increase won't be the last. But sooner or later NNSA's spending spree will end. Some of its projects will be abandoned. The nation will not be able to support operation of two factories for plutonium warhead cores ("pits"), for example. Pit operations at LANL, the site with the highest costs by far, will be curtailed.

"The second main problem is the total absence of detail as to how all this money is to be spent. In theory and in law, budget details are supposed to be provided to Congress on the first Monday in February. We haven't seen them yet. There will be no time to review them if and when they come out, so Congress will be cut out of the loop as far as oversight goes. This gigantic increase in warhead spending will be decided by an up-or-down vote. It is a terrible procedure. 

"One can argue that the ongoing dysfunction of Congress justifies this draconian approach to budget-making, but frankly I would rather see the whole government shut down and the members of Congress face the wrath of their constituents than to use the present reconciliation process to fund the whole government.

"The third main problem is that this increase is so huge that NNSA won't be able to spend it all. Some of it will go into NNSA's big piggy bank of funds provided but never spent. We believe that is where much of last year's emergency appropriation now resides, along with billions more.

The proposed NNSA spending level for FY2026 can be seen in historical context in the graph below (bigger). NNSA planning and budgeting documents over recent years are here.

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