
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) dinged the National Nuclear Security Administration recently for not providing 10 years' worth of cost forecasts in an annual report to Congress on defense nuclear spending. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency by law must write a joint report each year with the Defense Department profiling the expected costs of ongoing nuclear-weapon and nuclear-weapon-complex modernization. The law, the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, says each agency must provide a decade’s worth of cost estimates,…