Washington: In a moved aimed at giving the Department of Defense a far stronger hand in crafting the funding for nuclear issues, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) has proposed a radical change to how the nuclear weapons budget is formed every year.
The move follows a contentious budget fight between DOE and Congressional supporters of the Pentagon earlier this year, which ultimately resulted in National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) receiving a significant budget increase over what Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette requested. During that situation, Brouillette clashed with Sen. Jim Inhofe, the SASC chairman who crafted the newest budget proposal.
The January flare up over NNSA’s budget was “certainly the driving factor” in SASC’s push to modify how the budget process works, according to a SASC aide, speaking on background ahead of NDAA negotiations. But the aide added that it has been “fairly clear” for a while that “the system as it’s set up right now, in law and by practice, is not functioning very efficiently.”
Under the proposal, NNSA’s budget request would still be built within the DoE. But instead of the request then going to the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the whole government budget process, NNSA’s portion would be sent first to the Nuclear Weapons Council. The council would assess and make changes to the request in order to better align it with the Pentagon’s views of what is needed, and send the document back to DoE.
“If these provisions were to become law, other energy department national security missions, such as defence environmental cleanup, would be at greater risk from the budget axe,” said Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association. “Instead of giving the Council even freer rein, Congress should be seeking more transparency from the Council about its deliberations and how it goes about generating requirements for the nuclear arsenal.”
Jurisdictionally, the development of nuclear weapons falls under armed services committee and so should not require approval from the energy committees in Congress, the aide said. The aide also stated that the language for the provision was based on language in place for years that allows the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy to modify the budgets of programmes within other government agencies related to drug policies.
NNSA spokeswoman Ana Gamonal de Navarro said in a statement that the agency “strongly objects” to the language in the NDAA.
