On the recordJune 26, 2018
I wish to discuss H.R. 5895, the Energy and Water, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, 2019. I thank Senate leadership and the Appropriations Committee for their work on this legislation. The Appropriations Committee's effort this year to return the Senate to regular order on annual spending bills is commendable, and the leadership of the committee honors a bipartisan commitment to keep the most controversial policy language out of these pieces of legislation. While we can agree that the legislation is indeed absent of unrelated policy riders, that does not mean all of the appropriations it contains and the resulting policy implications of those appropriations are good. One such misguided priority within this bill is funding an unnecessary, destabilizing, and thoroughly underexplained expansion of America's nuclear arsenal. In particular, the Fiscal Year 2019 Energy and Water Appropriations Act contains $65 million in funding to develop a new so-called low- yield nuclear weapon warhead: the W76-2. This is a new nuclear weapon that we simply just do not need. For this reason, I opposed this bill. I made clear during Senate consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act that developing the W76-2 low-yield nuclear warhead creates a new nuclear weapon that is unnecessary to maintain America's nuclear deterrent.…
