A congressional conference committee has proposed adding $458M more for nuclear weapons to the 2019 spending bill, with a total $44.6B allocated to the Department of Energy, Defense News reported Wednesday.
The bill will provide $11.1B to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear warhead management operations, and $1.9B to sustain U.S. nuclear warheads to comply with the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, released in February.
The compromise funding plan additionally allocates $65M for the development of a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile and the modernization of a nuclear warhead for the U.S. Navy‘s Trident II D5 weapon.
The bill aligns with President Trump’s plan to refresh and expand America’s nuclear arsenal.
Congress will review the proposed nuclear weapons budget along with other government-spending bills before September ends.
Related Articles
Four U.S. senators have proposed a bipartisan bill that seeks to address price gouging by defense contractors and improve transparency in maintenance contracts. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., introduced the Transparency in Contract Pricing Act of 2025 with Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Joni Ernst, R-Iowa. In a statement published Wednesday, Warren said some contractors threaten U.S. military readiness by introducing unreasonably high prices into military contracts for spare parts and other basic materials. “Our common-sense bill puts these contractors on notice and requires them to justify major price increases — and they can bet we’ll double-check
Savannah River National Laboratory has named Dana Hewit as its deputy laboratory director for operations. Hewit, who previously led the Office of Integrated Performance Management at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will officially join SRNL in mid-October, the South Carolina lab said Monday. In her new role, she will oversee the laboratory’s facilities and infrastructure and ensure that SRNL is operating safely, securely, efficiently and in compliance with the Department of Energy’s mission. “I am honored to join SRNL at such an exciting time for the laboratory,” stated the official “I look forward to working with the talented operations team and
The Federal Aviation Administration and MITRE have unveiled a benchmark to facilitate the assessment of large language models, or LLMs, for aerospace tasks. ALUE Benchmark MITRE said Wednesday the Aerospace Language Understanding Evaluation, or ALUE, benchmark is designed to streamline the inference and evaluation of LLMs using information specific to the aerospace domain. ALUE supports open-source and domain-specific LLMs, custom datasets, user-defined prompts and various quantitative performance metrics. LLM evaluations are important in assessing a model’s performance and understanding its potential risks and limitations, including biases, hallucinations and privacy concerns. “ALUE allows the FAA and the aerospace community to create