The pending federal debt-limit deal raises the possibility of deep defense budget cuts and makes it unlikely that plans for a long-term increase in U.S. nuclear weapons spending will go forward, experts said Monday.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget is one of the largest federal outlays in New Mexico, supporting work at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories to the tune of some $3 billion this year, with plans for substantial increases in coming years.
Whether the deal would mean actual cuts at the labs remains unclear. But at the very least, the substantial increases proposed last year appear vulnerable, said Baker Spring, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation.
That could threaten plans to build a multibillion-dollar laboratory at Los Alamos and to spend money at Sandia on refurbishment of U.S. nuclear bombs.
The bargain struck over the weekend by the White House and Congress places a large part of the budget-cutting burden on national security spending, and the deal explicitly makes clear that the National Nuclear Security Administration must be considered as part of that process.
The deal calls for modest initial defense cuts in the next year, but the long-term budget goals laid out in the deal – $350 billion in defense cuts over 10 years with much deeper spending reductions possible – make it unlikely that this and future administrations will be able to sustain the sort of increases proposed by the Obama administration in a 10-year nuclear weapons spending plan laid out last November, said Kingston Reif, an analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
“This means some tough choices are ahead for NNSA,” Reif said Monday.
The deal included two significant provisions with the potential to impact lab funding.
Currently, the labs’ nuclear work is funded within the budget of the Department of Energy, separate from the rest of the nation’s military-related funding. That administrative and budget structure results from a decision following World War II to maintain civilian control and management of nuclear weapons design and manufacturing. As a result, nuclear weapons budget decisions are made separately from decisions about spending on the U.S. military.
But the deal that passed the House on Monday explicitly lumps the National Nuclear Security Administration in with the military for budget-cutting purposes.
The deal also established a congressional commission to work out the details of deeper, long-term cuts. If that process fails, the agreement calls for automatic, deeper cuts in military spending. Such cuts would be “very damaging” to the U.S. nuclear weapons budget, Spring said.
That could pose major problems for the labs, as well as military bases in New Mexico, said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.
“It could result in significant cuts at both our defense installations and our laboratories if this committee called for in the legislation is not able to come up with a deficit reduction package that can be passed and get signed,” Bingaman said.
At Los Alamos, the long-term budget plan calls for spending between $3.7 billion and $5.8 billion on a new laboratory for analysis of plutonium used in nuclear weapons. At Sandia, a big part of the increasing budget is targeted at work on refurbishing the nation’s B61 nuclear bombs.
The spending on Los Alamos’ plutonium laboratory is particularly vulnerable, Reif said, because of the NNSA’s desire to simultaneously build a multibillion-dollar building complex in Tennessee to work with uranium nuclear bomb parts. The agency may be forced to abandon its plan to build both at the same time, Reif said.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
