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Overview
Legislative Summary: 2005 Session
In 2005, the first session of the 109th Congress considered several policy and funding initiatives to address the threat of nuclear terrorism, an issue which had received increased political and media attention in the previous election year. By the end of the session Congress had produced a relatively sparse collection of new initiatives in this area, though some of the measures passed are certainly notable. As usual, the FY 2006 Defense Authorization Act and the FY 2006 Energy and Water Appropriations Act were two critical legislative vehicles for budget and policy initiatives in the first year of the 109th Congress. For example, the Defense Authorization Act made permanent the authority for the president to waive the legal qualifications required of cooperative threat reduction recipient countries, if doing so is important to national security; in 2002 Congress originally had provided that authority to last for three years. At the same time, the final bill rejected a Senate proposal that would have repealed the underlying restrictions altogether. Meanwhile the Energy and Water Appropriations Act added significant amounts of funding to the administration’s original request for several programs aimed at controlling nuclear warheads and materials overseas.
This page provides a summary of the key pieces of legislation related to controlling nuclear warheads and materials in the 2005 session of the 109th Congress (readers can also review activities from 2004, 2003, and 2002). It is intended to highlight only the major relevant bills and their central provisions, as more detailed discussions can be found elsewhere.[1] It is divided between legislation passed into law, and legislation that failed to pass in 2005 (though where noted provisions from such bills may be in other pieces of legislation). For each bill, users can click on the bill number to open a new window with the actual bill text from the Library of Congress' Thomas website.
KEY BILLS CONSIDERED IN 2005 |
HIGHLIGHTS | STATUS |
Key Legislation Passed in 2005
National
Defense Authorization Act for FY 2006
(Public Law 109-163)
As the primary annual legislative vehicle guiding United States defense policy, the Defense Authorization Act often contains congressional directives for nonproliferation threat reduction activities at the Departments of Defense (DOD) and Energy (DOE). The House of Representatives passed its initial version of the bill on 25 May 2005; the Senate approved its version on 15 November. After contentious negotiations between the House and the Senate (mostly over disagreements related to the treatment of persons in U.S. custody), a final conference agreement was filed late in the legislative session, on 18 December 2005 (House Report 109-360). The next day the House approved the legislation by a vote of 374-41; two days later the Senate approved the bill by voice vote. The president signed the bill into law on 6 January 2006.
For DOD cooperative threat reduction (CTR) programs the bill authorizes $415.549 million, the same total as requested by the administration. In a provision following the original Senate language (though the original House version had been very similar), the legislation requires that DOD notify Congress thirty days in before funding program activities at levels different than those specified in the bill. For DOE’s nonproliferation programs, the final bill authorizes $1.6 billion, $6.1 million below the requested amount. Note that these are only authorization amounts: the actual funding levels these programs can legally spend are determined by the Defense (for DOD) and the Energy & Water (for DOE) appropriations bills. Generally the dollar amounts recommended by the authorizing committee influence but do not directly determine the funding levels set in the appropriations process (authorizing committees can call upon certain congressional rules to help enforce their funding authorizations), though often appropriations committees withstand such influence and follow their own counsel in setting annual funding levels. In this particular case both Congress approved both the Defense and Energy & Water Appropriations bills before this bill, thus curtailing the authorizing legislation’s influence on the overall funding level (though the provision requiring notification before deviating from specified allocations keeps the authorizing committees involved in budget decisions).
House and Senate conferees settled, at least for one year, an important policy dispute arising from differing approaches in the two bodies’ original versions of the bill. In Section 1303, the conference committee agreed to language from the Senate-passed bill that indefinitely allows the president to waive annually the legal qualifications required of cooperative threat reduction recipient countries, if doing so is important to national security. The final legislation makes permanent the waiver authority that Congress had provided in 2002 to run only through the end of FY 2005 (in its initial version of the bill, the House had wanted the authority to be renewed only through 2007). The original 2002 legislation requires that in waiving the restrictions the president must submit both a report detailing the activities by the recipient country that would otherwise trigger the restrictions and a plan for addressing those problematic activities. In exchange for the House’s concession, it appears, the Senate agreed to exclude from the final bill an amendment successfully added by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) during the initial Senate debate; Lugar’s amendment would have repealed the underlying restrictions altogether, which in turn would have obviated the need for any presidential waiver.
The final bill also includes several provisions that only one or the other house had initially thought to include. Section 1304 of the final bill contains a provision originating in the House (though amended slightly by the conference committee) requiring by November 2006 a report from the president on the impediments to effective execution of threat reduction programs in the former Soviet Union. Section 1305 is a Senate-originated provision repealing a previous congressional requirement that the DOD comptroller general confirm the information contained in DOD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction annual report. The final bill (Section 3116) requires the administration to report on coordination among programs at the Departments of Energy, State, Defense, and Homeland Security to improve border security and export controls in other countries; the House accepted with slight amendment this provision that had originated in the Senate (see our pages on current efforts in this area). The bill also follows the House’s lead in requiring a report evaluating U.S. efforts to encourage or facilitate a proper accounting for and securing of the non-strategic nuclear weapons of the Russian Federation. The conferees amended the House’s original language only by setting the date the report is due to 15 April 2006. Finally, the House and Senate conferees amended a Senate-originated mandate requiring a DOE report on its plan to comply with DOE’s new design basis threat (DBT) for DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration facilities. As amended by the conference committee, the final bill clarifies that the DBT issued in November 2005 is the one to be considered in the report, it mandates that the requirements of the November 2005 DBT are to be compared with the DBT that had been issued in May 2003, and it requires the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review and comment on DOE’s report no later than one year after the bill’s enactment.
The final bill did not include some provisions included in either of the versions originally passed by the House or the Senate. For example, the original House bill had included a provision that would authorize DOD to use funding provided for DOD's Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation Prevention Initiative to instead accelerate the nuclear weapons storage security program, if Russia offered an accelerated pace of cooperation. Instead of including this specific provision, the conferees noted in their report that the bill details procedures for when DOD wishes to alter funding allocations. Beyond spurning the Lugar amendment lifting restrictions on CTR assistance, the conferees also rejected a Senate provision that would have allowed CTR assistance to countries outside the former Soviet Union if the secretary of defense certified such assistance was necessary (current law, as added in the 2003 session, requires that the president certify to Congress that such help is urgently needed).
Original Senate Bill
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved a version of the bill on 13 May 2005 (along with Senate Report 109-69). The full Senate initially debated the bill in July, but Senate leaders pulled the bill from the floor when the Senate failed to close debate before considering several controversial amendments (unrelated to controlling nuclear warheads and materials). The Senate resumed debate on the bill in November; it finally passed, by a vote of 98-0, its initial version of the bill on 15 November 2005.
The Senate’s version of the bill would have authorized for both DOE’s nuclear nonproliferation programs and for DOD’s cooperative threat reduction programs the same overall funding levels as the administration requested for FY 2006. During debate on the Senate floor, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) introduced for himself and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, an amendment that would have added $50 million to DOD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction account, offset by a reduction in funding for ground-based national missile defense interceptors. Senator Reed then pulled that amendment and introduced a very similar amendment that included as offsets funding for both the interceptors and their silos; Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), John Kerry (D-MA), and Frank Lautenburg (D-NJ) signed on to the second amendment as cosponsors. Senator John Warner (R-VA), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, opposed the amendment, saying it would undermine progress in the ballistic missile defense program, while arguing that unobligated balances in the CTR account prove that still more funding would not speed those efforts. The Senate rejected the amendment by a vote of 37-60. Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) were the lone Republicans to vote for the measure; eight Democrats voted against. The conference committee reconciling the House and Senate versions of the bill slightly revised the authorized funding levels, as noted above.
Section 1303 of the bill submitted by the Armed Services Committee contained language that, unlike the House bill, would have made permanent the authority provided temporarily in 2002 to the president to waive the restrictions placed on CTR recipient countries, if doing so were important to national security. The language in the bill reported out of committee had been comparable to that proposed in S. 313 and H.R. 665, but it would have failed to repeal the underlying certification and reporting requirements and still would have required an annual report on the conditions comparable to that required in the House bill.
During debate on the Senate floor, Senator Lugar introduced as a bipartisan amendment the language from S. 313 that would have repealed several certification requirements. The Senate agreed to the amendment on 21 July 2005, by a vote of 78-19. As noted above, the conference committee reconciling the differences of the House and Senate bills kept the Lugar amendment out of the final bill, but it retained the permanent waiver authority.
Other Senate provisions also failed to win final passage. Unlike the House bill, the Senate bill included a provision that would have modified the authority of DOD to use Cooperative Threat Reduction account funds for projects in countries outside the former Soviet Union (Section 1304). The language in the bill did not match that proposed in S. 313 or H.R. 665, however, as it would not have lifted the requirement that no more $50 million be spent under the authority provided to carry out projects outside the former Soviet Union.[2] The Senate initial version of the bill also would have given to the secretary of defense, rather than the president, the authority to determine that DOD Cooperative Threat Reduction account funds needed to be spent outside the former Soviet Union. The bill also would have required that DOD notify the appropriate congressional committees 15 days in advance of using the authority, rather than 10 days after the fact, as the law now stands. As noted above, the final bill excluded both of these provisions
Not all Senate provisions suffered the same fate. The Senate bill would have repealed a requirement that the DOD comptroller general confirm the information contained in DOD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction annual report. The Armed Services Committee explained in its report that it is confident that the CTR annual report is thorough and accurate. The initial Senate version of the bill also would have required the administration to submit a report on how the Departments of Energy, State, Defense, and Homeland Security are coordinating programs to improve border security and export controls in other countries (Section 3107). The bill additionally would have forced DOE to report, within 180 days after the bill’s passage, on DOE’s plan to comply by the end of FY 2007 with the Design Basis Threat (DBT) for DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration facilities. In its report, the Armed Services Committee expressed its concern with “the pace of security enhancements at DOE and NNSA sites in the face of threats assessed by the intelligence community since the attacks of September 11, 2001. While both DOE and NNSA have undertaken commendable near-term efforts to hire additional security personnel and reinforce operational security, longer-term efforts to harden facilities physically and to apply security technology have lagged.” All of these provisions, with slight modifications, found their way into the final version enacted into law.
Original House Bill
The House Armed Services Committee approved an initial version of the bill on 19 May 2005. On 25 May 2005, the full House endorsed, without considering any amendments directly relevant to controlling nuclear warheads and materials, a version of the bill; the vote was 390-39.
The bill would have authorized a funding level for DOD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction account equal to the overall administration request. For DOE's Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account, which includes funding for cooperative nonproliferation assistance, the House bill would have authorized $122 million less than the administration's request of $1.637 billion. During the House Armed Services Committee’s consideration of the bill, the committee voted down a proposed amendment by Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.) that would have transferred funding from national missile defense to nonproliferation and cooperative threat reduction accounts.
Section 1304 of the bill would have extended through calendar year 2007 the authority provided temporarily in 2002 to the president to annually waive the restrictions placed on cooperative threat reduction recipient countries, if doing so is important to national security. The committee's report explicitly opposed making the waiver authority permanent. The final bill rejected this stance, extending the waiver authority indefinitely.
The bill as passed in the House would have required by November 2006 a report from the president on the impediments to effective execution of threat reduction programs in the former Soviet Union. Another section would have required a report evaluating U.S. efforts to encourage or facilitate a proper accounting for and securing of the nonstrategic nuclear weapons of the Russian Federation. Both of these proposals found their way into the version of the bill adopted into law.
The bill also included a provision that would have served, in its words, to "increase DOD’s flexibility to respond to any greater willingness on Russia’s part to accept U.S. assistance in nuclear weapons security."[3] Specifically, Section 1303 of the bill would have authorized DOD to use funding provided for DOD's Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation Prevention Initiative to accelerate the nuclear weapons storage security program, if Russia offered accelerated cooperation. The House-Senate conference committee excluded this language from the final bill, though they noted that other provisions did provide DOD with the flexibility to reallocate funding levels subject to congressional notification.
For domestic nuclear security, the House-passed bill contained a provision that would have required DOE to conduct a risk and cost analysis for compliance with the new Design Basis Threat (DBT) security requirements updated in late 2004. The committee report complained about the high cost of meeting new DOE requirements for facilities to be able to defend against large, highly capable terrorist groups. As noted above, a final bill included a similar reporting requirement.
In its report accompanying the bill, the House Armed Services Committee made clear that in the language authorizing the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, in Section 3132 of the FY 2005 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress intended to provide broad authority for a program to remove or secure nuclear materials around the world. The specific actions listed in the 2005 bill were intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive. For instance, the committee report stated that Congress clearly envisions GTRI’s mission to include safeguarding and securing a nuclear weapon, as well as securing or converting the fuel in critical assemblies, pulsed reactors, isotope production reactors, and icebreaker reactors. The committee instructed DOE to "broadly interpret the Department of Energy's authority under section 3132 to carry out those activities worldwide involving the removal or storage of materials that will reduce the threat posed by nuclear proliferation."
The committee’s report also noted its satisfaction with the progress made by several Material Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A) programs, and authorized an extra $20 million beyond the budget request. Also, while expressing support of DOE's efforts to obtain international funding of the project to replace the plutonium production reactor at Zheleznogorsk, the committee stressed that it was important for the United States to demonstrate enough early financial support for the project to ensure it was completed on schedule. On the question of disposing of Russian and U.S. excess weapons plutonium, the committee directed that DOE submit a report along with its FY 2007 budget request to outline various alternative plutonium disposition strategies in the event that the U.S.-Russian liability dispute is not resolved. (That dispute has since been resolved, at least for the plutonium disposition program itself.) It ordered that a report be prepared on the usefulness of a thorium-based fuel program in disposing of excess plutonium.
FY
2006 Energy and Water Appropriations Act
(Public Law 109-103)
Policy directives in the Defense Authorization bill and other authorizing legislation like it are important, but to have real impact, such directives require sufficient resources. The annual Energy and Water Appropriations bill determines the resources available to the Department of Energy (DOE) to carry out policies regarding controlling nuclear warheads and materials. The House of Representatives passed its initial version of the bill on 24 May 2005; the Senate, on 1 July. A conference committee reconciling differences in the House and Senate bills took several months to prepare a final bill (House Report 109-275), which the House, by a vote of 399-17, and the Senate, by a vote of 84-4, enacted within a week. President Bush signed the bill into law on 19 November 2005.
For DOE programs aimed at controlling nuclear warheads and materials overseas, the enacted bill well exceeds the administration’s original request for several accounts. Unfortunately, Congress provided insufficient detail to calculate the full amount of funding for these programs; doing so will have to wait until sometime in February 2006, when DOE releases its budget proposal for FY 2007 and its accounting of its FY 2006 budget.
The final bill loads on nearly $84 million more than the administration’s $245.5 million request for the “core” Material Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A) program. The conferees provided this 34% increase over the request, in the words of their report, to “accelerate the new opportunities to secure nuclear warhead storage sites resulting from the Bratislava Summit agreement.” Thus, for the MPC&A program’s FY 2006 efforts, the House and Senate negotiators put in over $40 million more than either of their houses had originally deemed necessary, though each of those initial bills had been voted on well after Presidents Bush and Putin had met in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Without public explanation, House negotiators accepted the Senate-passed level for the Second Line of Defense effort, providing the same $97.9 million that the administration had originally requested. The House initially had added $25 million to the request for the traditional Second Line of Defense program, along with $20 million extra for the Megaports Initiative to accelerate work at additional high-risk ports. Senate conferees apparently held fast to their funding proposal.
For the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), the final bill drops, without explanation, the additional funding that the House and Senate had each endorsed in their initial versions of the bill; the bill instead appropriates nearly $98.0 million for FY 2006, matching the administration’s original request. Following the Senate’s lead, the conference committee did include $10 million for “initiatives focused on removing nuclear materials from vulnerable sites around the world” in the Nonproliferation and International Security subaccount, even though there is a separate GTRI subaccount. It will not be clear how DOE has transferred that funding to the control of GTRI until DOE releases its budget request in February 2006. Though the final bill does not provide funding in the GTRI account beyond the amount sought by the administration, the conferees stated they had provided up to $7 million to support conversion of up to four U.S. university research reactors from an HEU core to a low-enriched uranium (LEU) one.[4] DOE did not plan for this activity in its request, so other GTRI efforts will have to sacrifice resources to carry out any aspect of this domestic conversion, though the $10 million provided for the other account will offset this sacrifice.
House and Senate conferees had to compromise to reconcile funding levels for other programs that differed among their respective houses’ initial bills and the administration’s request. For the Global Initiative for Proliferation Prevention, which includes the Nuclear Cities Initiative and the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, the two sides split the difference between an initial House bill that had wanted to provide just over $30 million and a Senate version that would have appropriated nearly $51 million. At exactly $40 million, the final funding level is an increase over the administration’s request of $37.9 million. For DOE’s program to Eliminate Weapons-Grade Plutonium Production in Russia, conferees settled on $176.6 million in FY 2006 funding, a level about midway between the House’s initial amount of $197 million and the Senate’s proposed level of $152 million. This annual budget is still over four times greater than the program’s budget for the previous year.
The final bill abandons for some activities the funding level the House and the Senate appeared to have agreed upon in their initial versions of the bill. For the program to aid Russia in disposing of its excess weapons plutonium, each house had endorsed the administration’s requested amount of $64 million, but the final bill provides $34.5 million in FY 2006 funds. Conferees cut the request despite noting in their report that the dispute with Russia over liability for the project has been resolved and that work can move forward. (The final bill provides just under $150 million less than the administration requested for comparable efforts to dispose of excess U.S. plutonium and highly enriched uranium [HEU]. These two efforts will instead have $439 million to work with in FY 2006. Because it is currently the far more expensive, most of the reduction will be borne by the U.S. plutonium disposition effort, but the conference report left unclear the exact split between the two efforts.) The program to ensure transparency in the implementation of the U.S.-Russian HEU Purchase Agreement also suffered at the hands of conferees. They approved an FY 2006 budget of approximately $19.5 million, when both the Senate and the House had initially approved their nearly $20.5 million budget request.
In their report accompanying the bill, the House and Senate conferees amended a Senate-originate proposal: the final bill directs DOE to use $3 million from the funding provided for the Nonproliferation and International Security subaccount to provide grants to institutions of higher learning and non-profit organizations for research on nuclear nonproliferation and detection of chemical and biological weapons. No one grant may be larger than $225,000. Beyond providing this unfunded mandate, the conference committee bill sliced over $5 million off of the administration’s $80.2 million request for the Nonproliferation and International Security subaccount. This subaccount contains funding for both DOE’s International Nuclear Security effort and its Warhead and Fissile Material Transparency program. Until DOE releases its annual congressional budget justification sometime in February 2006, the final FY 2006 budget for these programs will not be readily clear.
Original Senate Bill
On 16 June, the Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously approved a version of the FY 2006 Energy and Water Appropriations bill that differed in several important ways from the version of the bill approved by the House (see the accompanying report, Senate Report 109-084). The Appropriations Committee made only slight changes from the version that had been approved by the committee’s Energy and Water Subcommittee two days before. The full Senate approved its version of the bill on 1 July by a vote of 92-3. The version of the bill approved by the Senate would have provided $1.729 billion in funding for DOE’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account, an amount almost $92 million above the administration’s request, and fully $228 million above the amount provided in the House bill. In many ways the Senate bill was much closer to the administration’s request than it is to the version of the bill proposed by the House.
The Senate bill would have added $10 million for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) to “reinvigorate,” in the words of the committee’s report, “initiatives focused on removing nuclear materials from vulnerable sites around the world.” (That funding was added as part of the Nonproliferation and International Security subaccount, even though there is a separate GTRI account.) The bill also would have provided $11 million directly for specific efforts within GTRI. Of that, $7 million was to support conversion of four U.S. university research reactors from a highly enriched uranium (HEU) core to low-enriched uranium (LEU). The remainder of the funding was for the Radiological Threat Reduction component of the GTRI, to recover and store greater than class C domestic radiological sources. In its report, the Appropriations Committee also sought to make it clear to DOE that it should use “any and all incentives available” to speed up conversion of other reactors away from HEU.
The Senate’s version of the bill would have increased by $13 million the administration’s request for the Global Initiative for Proliferation Prevention, which had been previously known as the Russian Transition Initiatives, and which includes the Nuclear Cities Initiative and the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention. Total funding for FY 2006 for the program in the Senate bill was nearly $51 million.
The Senate bill also would have added $20 million above the request for DOE’s program to Eliminate Weapons-Grade Plutonium Production in Russia, bringing the program’s proposed total to $152 million. The Senate bill would have added the $20 million to support the effort to convert the plutonium-producing reactor at Zheleznogorsk. Had it been enacted, the funding level for this account would have represented nearly a fourfold increase over the FY 2005 level of just over $40 million; nevertheless, this initial Senate proposal was still $45 million lower than the House proposal. (As noted above, the final bill appropriated a sum almost exactly midway between the two proposals.)
In its report accompanying its version of the bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee directed that DOE use $5 million out of the funding provided for the Nonproliferation and International Security subaccount to provide at least 10 grants to institutions of higher learning and non-profit organizations to support research on nuclear nonproliferation and detection of chemical and biological weapons. No more than $500,000 is to be provided for any one grant. (The legislation signed into law endorsed this policy, but it reduced the total to $3 million and capped each grant at $225,000.)
Like the House, the original Senate bill would have provided the full $64 million requested by the administration to aid Russia in disposing of its excess weapons plutonium. Perhaps the largest difference from the initial House proposal was in the program to dispose of the United States’ excess weapons plutonium. Regarding the program as comparable in importance for national security to DOE’s nuclear weapons work, the Senate bill would have provided the full amount requested by the administration for the U.S. plutonium disposition program ($486 million) and for the excess HEU disposition effort ($103 million). (As discussed elsewhere, the House bill would have provided significantly less than the amount requested by the administration because the U.S. program was held up by the long delay in negotiating liability arrangements for Russian disposition program; the two houses compromised in the final bill passed into law.)
The Senate bill would have provided the nearly $246 million that the administration requested for the “core” Material Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A) program (that is, excluding the Second Line of Defense program), but would have added nothing to that request, unlike the House. Similarly, the Senate bill would have provided the requested $98 million for the Second Line of Defense program, including the nearly $74 million sought by the administration for the Megaports Initiative to install radiation detection equipment at major seaports around the world.
The Senate did not specify any other specific funding changes for programs aimed at controlling nuclear warheads, material, and expertise.
Original House Bill
The Energy and Water Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee approved by voice vote its original version of the FY 2006 bill on 12 May 2005. The full Committee in turn approved a slightly amended version of the bill on 18 May. The Appropriations Committee’s report on its version of the bill is House Report 109-86. The bill would have provided $1.5 billion for the DOE’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account; this amount is $8 million above the FY 2005 level, but $136 million lower than what the administration requested. In its report, the committee directed that no more than 40% of funds intended for cooperative nonproliferation programs in Russia be spent for administrative functions inside the United States (since the final committee did not explicitly endorse this directive, it does not appear to have the force of law, but it would be unwise for DOE to openly flaunt the House Appropriations Committee’s will).
For the “core” Material Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A) program, the Appropriations Committee’s bill would have provided an additional $40 million above the administration’s $245.5 million request, to fund “high priority work” at 12th Main Directorate sites in Russia. The committee report stated that it supports continuing efforts to “accelerate aggressively opportunities to secure material as site access is granted.” “Given budget constraints,” the report stated, “the Committee views the hundreds of metric tons of nuclear material in Russia still stored under inadequate security and subject to theft or diversion as the highest risk potential for weapons-usable nuclear material diversion.”
For the Second Line of Defense effort, the Appropriation Committee would have allocated $45 million above to the request, which would have brought the total to $142.9 million. The committee wanted $25 million extra to go to the traditional Second Line of Defense program and $20 million more to accelerate the Megaports Initiative’s work at additional high-risk ports.
The House Appropriations Committee’s initial version of the bill also would have provided a $14 million increase over the amount requested for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI). The committee had wanted to appropriate an additional $20 million beyond the $24.7 million requested for the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR) program, in order to accelerate conversion of domestic research reactors from highly enriched uranium fuel to low-enriched uranium. $6 million of that $20 million increase was offset by a reduction of the new funding for the Kazakhstan Spent Fuel Disposition component of the GTRI. On the latter reduction, the committee renewed its longstanding concern that the current plan for addressing the spent fuel from Kazakhstan’s BN-350 reactor is not appropriate in the post-9/11 security environment.
The administration had sought to change the name of the Russian Transition Initiatives program (which contains funding for both Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention and the Nuclear Cities Initiative) to the Global Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention. Not only did the Appropriations Committee reject that proposal, its version of the bill would have provided $7.6 million less in new funds than the administration requested. This would have brought new funding for FY 2006 for the Russian Transition Initiatives to $30.3 million. (The report of the House-Senate conference committee refers only to the “Global Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention,” so the House must have dropped its position on the program’s name.)
Even after the Appropriations Committee had for FY 2005 tried to cut the administration’s request program to Eliminate Russia’s Weapons Grade Plutonium Production, the committee’s initial FY 2006 bill would have added $65 million on top of the administration’s request. This proposed increase would have brought the total level of new funding to $197 million, a level 50% higher than what the administration requested, and nearly five times the final FY 2005 level. The additional funding was to be included to allow DOE to maintain the planned 2011 shutdown date for the reactor in Zheleznogorsk, despite setbacks in soliciting additional support for the project from countries participating in the Group of Eight Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Though the committee’s version of the appropriations bill would have cut new funding for the effort to dispose of excess weapons-grade plutonium by $301.7 million, to $351.4 million, the component of that effort going toward disposing of Russia’s excess plutonium would have received $64 million, the same amount as requested by the administration. (As noted above, the final bill ended up providing just over half of the administration’s request for this activity.)
All other relevant DOE programs focused on controlling nuclear warheads, materials and expertise would have been funded at the administration’s requested level if the bill had passed intact.
Original Administration Request
The DOE request for FY 2006 for programs aimed at controlling