NNSA And Sequestration

If the National Nuclear Security Administration were to face funding cuts due to sequestration, NNSA would have to work with the Defense Department to understand DOD's priorities, the head of NNSA told reporters this morning.

NNSA is actively working on extending the lives of the B61 and W76 nuclear warheads, and studying how it would go about extending the service life of W78 and W88 warheads, according to the agency's fiscal year 2013 budget justification book. If sequestration were to take place, NNSA would "work with [DOD] to figure out which of these three priority projects can we defer, push back the date on, and what's more important," agency Director Thomas D'Agostino said this morning at a Defense Writers Group breakfast, adding:

It's not just us in isolation -- sequestration is a much broader thing for us. I don't want to tell you what gets cut, because I don't know . . . if we would take any kind of cut at all in sequestration. I just don't know. But I will tell you that taking care of the stockpile, doing the surveillance work is kind of No. 1. We will work then with the Defense Department to determine, given the challenges that they might face in this particular environment and determine whether it impacts force structure, and if it does impact force structure . . . then it could impact the systems we work on.

But as Inside Missile Defense reports this week, D'Agostino hopes he won't need a backup plan in the event the federal government goes into sequestration:

"We don't have a sequestration plan," Thomas D'Agostino told members of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee at a Feb. 29 hearing on his organization's fiscal year 2013 budget request. "When I think of plans, I think of a . . . written-down document that has been approved in the organization of, if this happens, we're going to implement plan X, Y, and Z over here. I don't have that written-down document."