Responses needed to "The Energy Department is the Wrong Place to Manage Our Nuclear Stockpile"
Ellen Thomas
[We need a response to this interesting analysis with absolutely horrible conclusions. et]
The Energy Department is the Wrong Place to Manage Our Nuclear Stockpile
January 23, 2026 RealClearDefense
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/01/23/our_nuclear_weapons_need_a_new_home_1160419.html
Introduction
Nuclear deterrence is once again central to U.S. national security. The relative calm of the post-Cold War world has been replaced by an era of dangerous competition with two nuclear armed adversaries. China is rapidly expanding and diversifying its nuclear forces. Russia is modernizing its strategic and non-strategic arsenal while integrating nuclear signaling into conventional operations. Emerging technologies—from cyber operations to artificial intelligence and space-based systems—are compressing decision timelines and increasing the risk of miscalculation.
Yet the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise is organized for a different era.
At precisely the moment when speed, accountability, and delivery matter most, responsibility for the nation’s nuclear deterrent remains embedded within a large civilian department whose leadership incentives, culture, and political priorities are largely oriented toward domestic energy and environmental policy. The result is an institutional mismatch: a mission that demands singular focus is governed by a structure designed to balance competing objectives.
This is not primarily a question of leadership talent or commitment within the workforce. Nor is it a comment about the current leadership of the National Nuclear Security Administration: in fact, quite to the contrary. From all accounts, Administrator Brandon Williams and his deputy Scott Pappano understand the vital role of our nuclear deterrent and of the infrastructure on which it rests and are seeking to lead the enterprise in the right direction. But the problem is above them. Fundamentally, it is a question of institutional design, of attempts to rationalize where in the Federal government the responsibility for the nuclear weapons infrastructure belongs.
What was good on paper turned out not to be true in practice.
Nuclear deterrence is not simply another national-security program. It is a foundational mission whose failure cannot be mitigated, delegated, or delayed. It requires clear authority, unified accountability, and an organization whose sole purpose is to deliver safe, secure, and effective nuclear capabilities on credible timelines. The United States once recognized this reality.
For much of the Cold War, the United States treated stewardship of its nuclear deterrent as a singular national-security mission—organizationally distinct, politically insulated, and led by officials whose sole responsibility was the design, production, and sustainment of nuclear weapons.
In the three decades after World War II, nuclear weapons stewardship was managed by independent agencies—the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and later the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA)—whose exclusive focus was the nuclear enterprise. Those institutions, for all their flaws, were structured to produce results.
From 1947 until 1974, the responsibility for all things nuclear, including the nuclear weapons stockpile, rested with the AEC, an independent agency created by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and reporting directly to the President. The AEC oversaw the full nuclear weapons lifecycle: research, design, testing, production, deployment, maintenance, and ultimately retirement. Under this model, the United States produced literally tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, fielded successive generations of warheads, safely retired and dismantled weapons excess to national security and continuously refreshed the stockpile to meet evolving strategic requirements during intense competition with the Soviet Union.
When Congress abolished the AEC in 1974, it created the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA)—an independent, explicitly transitional agency. ERDA assumed responsibility for the nuclear weapons laboratories and production complex, while civilian nuclear regulation was separated into the newly created Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ERDA, like the AEC before it, retained a focused national-security mandate and continued to sustain large-scale nuclear weapons production during the final phase of the Cold War.
In 1977, amid the post-oil-shock reorganization of federal energy policy, ERDA was absorbed into the newly created Department of Energy (DOE). For the first time, stewardship of the U.S. nuclear deterrent became just one mission among many inside a broad civilian department oriented largely toward domestic energy, science, and environmental policy. And the Secretary of Energy’s budget priorities now had to balance nuclear weapons funding against a variety of other requirements with large domestic constituencies. This institutional shift marked a profound departure from three decades of U.S. practice—and its consequences remain with us today.
NNSA’s Creation: Stewardship, Not Production
Following a series of embarrassing (and dangerous) failures -- including Chinese espionage, the unsafe practices discovered at the Rocky Flats Plant which forced the facility’s dismantlement, and broader anxieties about security, oversight, and confidence in the nuclear enterprise after the end of nuclear explosive testing, Congress, in an attempt to solve the evident lack of focus on nuclear weapons within DoE, created the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in 2000
But it is essential to understand what NNSA was—and was not—designed to do.
NNSA was not conceived as a nuclear weapons production organization in the historical sense embodied by the AEC or ERDA. Instead, its institutional model was fundamentally shaped by the Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Program (SBSS), a post-Cold War framework intended to ensure that the existing nuclear arsenal would remain safe, secure, and effective without designing new warheads or conducting nuclear tests.
SBSS emphasized:
- surveillance and life-extension programs,
- high-performance computing and modeling,
- experimental science,
- conservative certification practices, and
- risk minimization above all else.
That mission was in many ways appropriate to its time—and by many measures, it succeeded. SBSS preserved confidence in a shrinking stockpile during a period of strategic pause. But it also embedded a very different organizational culture than one oriented toward production and delivery of new capability.
NNSA was optimized to maintain weapons, not to produce them.
That distinction is not semantic. It is foundational.
The end result, therefore, was to compound the fundamental error of placing the nuclear weapons infrastructure as only one of many responsibilities within a larger bureaucracy and then modifying its mission – all the while preserving the tension and tradeoff between funding the nuclear weapons infrastructure and domestic energy programs.
The consequences of this have been profound. The AEC and ERDA operated in an environment where production, iteration, and delivery were core competencies. Authority was clear, accountability was direct, and failure was defined as the inability to field new capability.
NNSA’s culture evolved around a different definition of success: avoiding risk to an existing stockpile. Oversight multiplied. Compliance became dominant. Decision authority migrated upward. Schedule discipline yielded to procedural caution.
This culture made sense in a world where:
- the stockpile was declining,
- modernization was incremental,
- timelines were long, and
- deterrence assumptions were relatively static.
It is deeply misaligned with today’s reality.
The United States is now attempting to execute simultaneous, large-scale nuclear modernization efforts—warheads, delivery systems, infrastructure recapitalization, and production capacity—while facing peer competitors who are expanding, diversifying, and modernizing their arsenals at speed.
An organization culturally optimized for stewardship and risk minimization struggles when asked to deliver production-scale capability under time pressure. And an organization ultimately under the control of a Cabinet Secretary who must deal with multiple competing demands on the Department’s resources is poorly positioned to prioritize the nuclear weapons enterprise. While the battle for priorities was evident during NNSA’s first 20 years, its magnitude and importance was starkly and shockingly demonstrated in January 2021. The then Secretary of Energy slashed nuclear weapons funding in preparing his proposed budget request for FY22. The NNSA Administrator, Lisa Gordon Hagerty, sent a reclama request seeking to secure additional funding for urgent nuclear modernization efforts. President Trump and his OMB director were persuaded by the reclama and directed restoring the original NNSA budget proposal. Energy Secretary Brouillette did so and then fired Ms. Gordon-Hagerty for exposing the threat to national security created by the underfunding.
This episode was not an anomaly. It was the predictable outcome of a governance model that places two leaders with overlapping responsibilities but divergent institutional incentives in direct competition.
DOE Governance: A Structural Mismatch for Deterrence
These cultural dynamics are reinforced by DOE governance.
As we have noted, DOE is a hybrid civilian department whose leadership incentives and organizational culture are increasingly shaped by non-defense missions—energy transition, climate policy, environmental remediation, and domestic economic priorities. Those missions are legitimate, but they demand a regulatory, risk-averse mindset fundamentally different from the one required to steward nuclear deterrence in a competitive strategic environment.
The result has been predictable:
- Nuclear deterrence becomes one priority among many, rather than the organizing principle.
- Senior leadership attention is fragmented.
- Governance is process-heavy but ownership-light.
- National-security decisions are filtered through a civilian regulatory culture ill-suited to deterrence demands.
No other nuclear-armed state organizes its nuclear weapons enterprise this way.
Congress has compounded the problem.
NNSA is authorized by the Armed Services Committees, where deterrence strategy and force posture are debated, but funded through the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittees, alongside civilian energy, and environmental programs. Strategy and resources are institutionally disconnected. History has shown how Members and Senators vote when the trade-off for funds is between nuclear weapons issues and energy and water projects in their own districts.
The 2014 Congressionally-mandated “Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise” (Mies-Augustine Panel”) explored fixing this by realigning Congressional oversight but, with several former members of Congress on the panel, was reluctant to criticize the extant Congressional approach. After nine more years of the Hill’s failure to correct the problem itself, the 2023 Congressionally mandated Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States explicitly recommended moving NNSA funding to the Defense Appropriations Subcommittees—recognizing that nuclear deterrence is a defense mission and should be resourced accordingly. Still, Congress has been unwilling to accept this challenge. Congress’s failure to correct this mismatch has reinforced the very delays, cost growth, and accountability gaps it routinely criticizes.
The Bottom Line
In today’s strategic environment, the United States needs an organization—and leadership—solely focused on the nuclear weapons which make our deterrent credible.
The status quo is not merely inefficient. It is strategically misaligned with the world the United States now faces.
In a world of renewed nuclear competition, stewardship alone is no longer sufficient. Deterrence now requires production and delivery of new weapons at a pace and scale which matches national requirements.
The United States must do more than preserve the current stockpile; it must produce the next generation of nuclear weapons at speed and scale
The AEC and ERDA eras demonstrated that the United States can build and sustain a large, effective nuclear arsenal when authority, accountability, and mission focus are aligned. The current model does not. Today’s model reflects a different set of assumptions: that nuclear deterrence can be managed as one mission among many; that compliance can substitute for execution; and that diffusion of authority reduces risk. In a world of renewed nuclear competition, those assumptions no longer hold.
Fifteen years ago the Mies-Augustine panel, in setting forth a series of recommended changes to the DoE-NNSA relationship noted that if its recommendations were not implemented within two years of the panel’s submission of its report “the only remaining course of action is to remove [NNSA} from what is now the Department of Energy and establish it as an autonomous, independent organization.” The panel’s recommendations in fact were not acted upon. The time has come to move on. Establishing NNSA as a stand-alone agency, reporting directly to the President, would not abandon safety, security, or civilian control. It would restore clarity of purpose and align organizational culture with strategic reality.
We therefore call on the Trump Administration to create a new an institutional home designed to re-establish the nuclear weapons infrastructure purpose as the firm foundation on which our national deterrence policy should rest.
The National Nuclear Security Administration should be established as a stand-alone sub-cabinet agency, reporting directly to the President, with clear authority and a singular mission: delivering the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The moment calls for nothing less.
Franklin C. Miller served for decades as a senior policy official in the Department of Defense and on the NSC staff. He was a member of the Mies-Augustine Commission and the Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.
Frank A. Rose is a former Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, a professional staff member on the House Committee on Armed Services, and a policy official at the Department of Defense.
