Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear disarmament group based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, put out a press release on June 4 reporting that the Trump Administration’s latest budget documents call for the largest year-on-year increase in spending on nuclear warheads since 1962. The overall increase includes $1.9 billion added to the FY24 appropriation for recovery from damage stemming from Hurricanes Helene and Milton and a $4.8 billion increase requested for FY26 over the FY24 appropriation bringing the total appropriation to nearly $24.9 billion for nuclear warhead activities of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency within the Department of Energy which is responsible for production, maintenance and storage of nuclear weapons. “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,” the release says.
Mello argues that there are three main problems with this process, the first of which is that “NNSA has too much to do.” He noted earlier that the 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.” Congress, he argues, “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.”
“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,” he goes on. “The nation will not be able to support operation of two factories for plutonium warhead cores ("pits"), for example,” referring to plans to expand pit production at two locations, Los Alamos, New Mexico and Savannah River, South Carolina, which have been beset by cost increases and schedule delays.
Secondly is the lack of oversight by Congress as the budget request came in months later than the statutory requirement of the first Monday in February, and thirdly, “this increase is so huge that NNSA won’t be able to spend it all.” Mello asserts that as a result “Some of it will go into NNSA’s big piggy bank of funds provided but never spent.”
