The budget brief was released a little over a month after the Congressional Budget Office published an analysis stating the cost of maintaining the nuclear stockpile over the next ten years was 25% higher than it had estimated two years ago.

Spending on nuclear weapons hasn’t seen an increase this large since the Cold War, said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.

“This is an arms race,” Mello said. “That’s what a 25% increase looks like.”

The budget brief states the requested funding will allow for six warheads to be modernized at the same time and increase capacity at NNSA sites, including pushing toward the goal of 80 plutonium pits produced per year — all in the hopes of keeping the nuclear deterrent fresh, the brief states.

“Weapons Activities provides for the maintenance and refurbishment of nuclear weapons to continue sustained confidence in their safety, reliability, and military effectiveness without resuming nuclear explosive testing,” the document states.

The increase to NNSA and weapons programs in particular is offset by cuts to other programming, including a nearly 75% cut to energy efficiency and renewable energy work, a 75% cut to grid deployment activities and a 31% cut to the Office of Fossil Energy.

“What it really is, is the department of nuclear weapons, not the department of energy,” said Nuclear Watch New Mexico executive director Jay Coghlan.

Impact on laboratories

The budget brief has scant details about how funding for LANL and Sandia National Laboratories might change in the upcoming fiscal year, beyond line items about the Department of Energy’s environmental management work done at each site.

The requested funding for cleanup at Los Alamos is 8% lower than the previous fiscal year, but the budget brief states the $281 million in requested funding will continue to go toward cleaning up legacy waste and, per a 2016 consent agreement with the state Environment Department, focus on remediating groundwater and soil and protecting surface waters. In September 2024, the consent order was revised after frustration over what the Environment Department saw as a lack of progress on cleanup efforts.

The DOE’s Los Alamos environmental management office and cleanup contractor N3B Los Alamos are expected to release an update on cleanup progress to the public June 12.

An interim measure to keep the spread of a hexavalent chromium plume at bay will also be funded, the budget brief states.

Earlier this year, an independent review team recommended a pump-and-treat method used to keep the plume from moving in certain directions be fully restarted in the meantime as more work is done to understand how widely and deeply the plume of carcinogenic chemicals extends. A 2023 Government Accountability Office report estimates fully cleaning up the plume could take more than a decade and cost up to $100 million.

The 8% decrease in environmental management funding for cleanups at LANL comes from plans to retrieve waste at one of the 32 pits dedicated to the disposal of radioactive legacy waste at Area G, a waste management area where the lab’s legacy waste is stored and remediated before it gets permanently disposed of off-site. Less money will go toward the deactivation and decommissioning of contaminated buildings, the brief states, because of “planned project execution.”

The total requested for cleanup at Sandia is 55% lower than the previous year, but the budget brief does not explain why.

But for at least one program, the brief is clear: Plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory is a go.

Although the dollar amount appropriated for pit production at LANL — which is charged with producing at least 30 of the radioactive cores of nuclear weapons per year — is not listed, the program is mentioned by the May 30 brief.

“[Fiscal year 2026] funding will support Plutonium Pit Production at both Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site” in South Carolina, the brief states.

But the local impact is difficult to nail down at this point.

“We can’t definitively say,” Coghlan said.

More detail desired

There may be a bit more meat on the bone in this recent, approximately 60-page budget brief than a previously released “skinny budget.”

But some advocates are still left feeling hungry.

Typically, DOE releases a detailed budget justification, broken into several volumes, each spanning hundreds of pages. Last year, the department released six volumes; the National Nuclear Security Administration volume alone was more than 700 pages.

So far, those documents have yet to be made public. The Department of Energy did not respond to a question from The New Mexican about when they would be made available.

Coghlan said these more detailed budget documents have been released later and later by the Department of Energy in recent years.

“[But] in my 30 years of doing this, this is the latest it has ever been for detailed budget releases,” Coghlan said.

Without the detailed budget documents, specific projects are difficult to pin down — making it harder for Congress to identify when programs run over budget, Mello said.

“There’s no accountability here,” Mello said. “Congress will not be able to study anything or make much of any decision.”