Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), are due to testify in Congress this week in separate budget hearings. It will be the second public trip to Capitol Hill in as many weeks for both officials.
Gordon-Hagerty will be first to face lawmakers this week. The new NNSA administrator is scheduled to testify about the agency’s proposed fiscal 2019 budget at 10 a.m. Tuesday Eastern time before the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee. She will be flanked by deputies Phil Calbos and Dave Huizenga, the respective heads of the NNSA’s nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs, and U.S. Navy Adm. James Caldwell, who runs NNSA’s naval reactors program.
For 2019, the White House has requested about $15 billion for the NNSA: around 16 percent above the current appropriation, and 8 percent higher than the $1-billion year-over-year boost the Trump administration requested for fiscal 2018. The agency’s Weapons Activities account, which manages nuclear-warhead refurbishment, would get about $11 billion of the total.
In a hearing last week with Perry, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), ranking member of the subcommittee Gordon-Hagerty will face Tuesday, called the White House’s proposed increased for the NNSA “staggeringly huge.”
Meanwhile, Perry is alone scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Thursday Eastern time in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing titled “Challenges in the Department of Energy’s Atomic Energy Defense Programs.”
Perry could face questions similar to those Gordon-Hagerty fielded last week during a hearing of the Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, where lawmakers grilled the NNSA chief about the agency’s potential plans to move some production of plutonium pits to South Carolina from New Mexico.
At last week’s subcommittee hearing, full committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) dropped by to grouse to Gordon-Hagerty about DoE’s apparent resolve to reopen an issue the Senate though it settled in a 2014 defense policy bill that called on the department to centralize production of pits — nuclear-warhead cores — at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Gordon-Hagerty told Reed the agency would inform Congress about its pit plans by May 11: a deadline lawmakers legislated late last year in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.
Perry might also face questions, as Gordon-Hagerty did last week, about whether the NNSA plans to start producing a low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile in fiscal 2019, as mandated by the Trump administration’s new Nuclear Posture Review.