Section 1043 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 requires the President, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy, to submit a report on the plan for the nuclear weapons stockpile, complex, delivery systems, and command and control system for each of fiscal years 2013 through 2019.estimates are among several elements that Congress required in the joint report. The other required elements include detailed descriptions of DOE’s and DOD’s plans to enhance the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear maintain, modernize, and replace delivery systems for nuclear weapons stockpile; sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex; weapons; sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons command and control system; and retire, dismantle, or eliminate any nuclear weapons, delivery systems, or silos/submarines that carry such weapons or delivery systems. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 expanded the reporting requirement under section 1043 with respect to costs. As amended, section 1043 requires the joint report to include a detailed estimate of the budget requirements associated with sustaining and modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent and nuclear weapons stockpile, including the costs associated with the plans outlined under the elements above, over the 10-year period following the date of the report. The joint report is also to include a detailed description of costs included in the budget estimates and the methodology used to create the estimates.modernizing U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities—including nuclear delivery systems, the nuclear command and control system, and the DOE’s and DOD’s 10-year estimates for sustaining and nuclear stockpile and nuclear security enterprise—total $263.8 billion through fiscal year 2023. These estimates are presented in figure 1. NNSA is required to submit the FYNSP to Congress at or about the same time as the President’s budget,NNSA’s annual budget-justification documents. NNSA’s Management and Budget office aggregated the FYNSP for fiscal years 2014 through 2018 by incorporating inputs from relevant program offices, including the Office of Defense Programs, Office of the Chief Information Officer, and Office of Safeguards and Security. and it is typically included as part of The FYDP is DOD’s 5-year funding plan; it is updated annually and provides DOD’s current budget request and budget estimates for at least 4 subsequent fiscal years. The FYDP includes thousands of discrete program elements, each of which may include funding projections for DOD’s appropriations accounts, including operation and maintenance; research, development, test, and evaluation; and procurement. The FYDP is maintained by DOD’s Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, who works with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) to ensure that the data presented in the annual budget- justification materials are equivalent to the FYDP estimates at the appropriation account level. DOE’s and DOD’s $263.8 billion budget estimates in the July 2013 joint report are generally consistent with their internal funding plans through fiscal year 2018, but their overall estimates in the joint report are incomplete; although DOE’s methodological assumptions are transparent in the related Fiscal Year 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, key DOD methodological assumptions and limitations underlying some estimates are not documented in the joint report, limiting the report’s transparency. DOE’s $97.5 billion estimate in the July 2013 joint report is consistent with the budget estimates described in its Fiscal Year 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan; however, as we previously found, DOE’s budget estimates do not represent total funding needed over the 10-year period covered by the joint report for key areas of its modernization plans, and therefore do not fully align with aspects of these plans. In December 2013 we recommended that DOE include a range of preliminary budget estimates in future funding plans to improve alignment, and DOE generally concurred with this recommendation. In this review, we found that DOD’s $125.5 billion estimate for nuclear delivery systems is generally consistent with its budget-justification documents and funding plans, but DOD’s 10-year budget estimate did not include potential estimates for key Air Force modernization efforts. Additionally, in preparing the $40.8 billion estimate for sustaining and modernizing the NC3 system, DOD did not document key methodological assumptions and limitations or make them transparent in the report. DOE’s $97.5 billion estimate in the joint report for sustaining and modernizing the nuclear stockpile and nuclear security enterprise is consistent with the funding plans in its FYNSP and its Fiscal Year 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, and its methodological assumptions for preparing this estimate are transparent, but as we found in December 2013, these estimates are incomplete because they are less than what will be needed through fiscal year 2023 to meet the schedules of key modernization efforts. Within DOE, NNSA’s Office of Defense Programs prepared the Fiscal Year 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan and its included budget estimates, which also form the basis for the budget estimates included in the joint report. As such, both documents used inputs from the FYNSP and other relevant offices. DOE described its sustainment and modernization plans for the nuclear weapons stockpile and nuclear security enterprise in the June 2013 Fiscal Year 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, and in the July 15, 2013, joint report. DOE’s plans focus substantially on efforts to refurbish various types of warheads and bombs associated with DOD’s weapon systems. Meeting production milestones for the planned scope of work requires significant advanced investment. In these plans, DOE stated its intentions to continue to produce refurbished W76-1 SLBM warheads through fiscal year 2019; in fiscal year 2019, begin producing refurbished B61-12 gravity bombs and replacing aging nonnuclear components in W88 SLBM warheads; both of these activities would take place through the early 2020s; in fiscal year 2024, begin producing a modernized cruise missile warhead; and in fiscal year 2025, begin producing an interoperable warhead—the W78/88-1—for use on ICBM and SLBM systems, as reported in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review Report. NNSA’s production plans for nuclear weapons refurbishments, as of July 2013, are summarized in figure 2. To support these nuclear weapons refurbishments, DOE’s plans also include constructing new plutonium and uranium facilities, which would replace existing facilities that are decades old, lack modern safety features, and are difficult and expensive to sustain. The joint report does not explicitly discuss NNSA’s methodology for developing its plan and estimates, but the report refers to the Fiscal Year 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, which provides information on how the estimates were developed. NNSA uses a system of planning, programming, budgeting, and evaluation to develop its annual budget requests and to plan for future budget requests. As we reported in December 2013, NNSA incorporated an automatic increase of 2 percent per year to account for inflation for those activities after fiscal year 2018 that were expected to continue to operate at the same level of effort as during the FYNSP period. Further, we reported that for activities where NNSA expected a change to the level of effort—such as life- extension programs—NNSA instead used available planning data. In the case of life-extension programs, these data included cost estimates based on an improved cost model that, according to NNSA officials, is more likely to be accurate than estimates generated using the previous approach because they are based on the costs of a life-extension program that is in progress, rather than a program that was never executed. While DOE took steps to ensure that its total budget estimates for each life-extension program would cover the programs’ costs to achieve their first production units, in December 2013 we found that NNSA’s funding plans included in the FYNSP are less than what will be needed to meet schedules reflected in the joint report. DOE’s estimates in the joint report include $43.4 billion through fiscal year 2018, which is consistent with NNSA’s FYNSP and fiscal year 2014 budget submission. we concluded in December 2013, to meet planned milestones for key warhead life-extension programs, additional funds above the estimates included in the FYNSP will be needed. For example, we found that the FYNSP understated NNSA’s budget estimates for both the cruise missile warhead life-extension program, and for the W78/88-1 (“interoperable warhead”) life-extension program, both of which, according to the joint report, are to begin production in the mid-2020s. An NNSA official told us that the agency shifted funding within its budget estimates for these two programs beyond fiscal year 2019 to stay within guidelines set by the Office of Management and Budget for the FYNSP period. According to the official, the estimates beyond 2019 were not subject to funding targets to the same extent as the estimates were for fiscal years 2014 through 2018. As a result, in December 2013 we concluded that DOE may need additional funding before fiscal year 2019 in order to prepare for these modernization efforts and meet its schedules. NNSA’s top-line estimates in the joint report include an estimated $5.9 billion in budget authority transfer from DOD, which is identified in DOD’s FYDP but not reported in the joint report. savings. We also found that NNSA excluded most of the budget estimates for a modernized plutonium capability, either for construction of a Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility or an alternative to this facility.