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Trump’s proposed 2027 budget would almost double the budget for plutonium pits, the chemical filled metal sphere inside a nuclear warhead that kicks off the explosion in a nuclear weapon. The same budget would slash almost $400 million from nuclear environmental cleanup. The budget request follows a leaked National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) memo calling on America’s nuclear scientists to prototype new kinds of nukes and to double plutonium pit production from 30 to 60 triggers a year.
About the size of a bowling ball, a plutonium pit is an essential part of a nuclear warhead. The implosion of these plutonium filled balls in a nuclear weapon triggers the massive explosion and unleashes the weapon’s destructive potential. Until 1992, American manufactured 1,000 plutonium pits a year. Now it makes fewer than 30. Trump wants to change that and he’s willing to throw money at the problem to make it happen.
The 2027 White House budget request sets aside $53.9 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE). This includes a 87 percent increase of funding for pit production at the Savannah River Site—$2.25 billion up from $1.2 billion—and an 83 percent increase in pit funding at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL)—$2.4 billion up from $1.3 billion.
These are shocking increases, especially given that there are around 15,000 existing and unused plutonium pits sitting in a warehouse in Texas. “We have thousands of pits that should be eligible to be reused. The NNSA has publicly acknowledged that they will be reusing pits for some number of warheads,” Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told 404 Media.
Many of those plutonium pits are old and some in the American government have concerns that they no longer function. But a 2006 and 2019 study from an independent group of scientists said the nuclear triggers should have a lifespan of 85 to 100 years. But some interpreted the 2019 study as cause for alarm.
Matthew Gault
“They essentially said we haven’t learned anything alarming about detrimental degradation to pits, but nonetheless the NNSA should resume pit production ‘as expeditiously as possible.’ So those words ‘as expeditiously as possible,’ that raised a lot of alarm because it suggested there was something to worry about,” Spaulding said. “I don’t think it’s clear to me that there’s any physical evidence that pits have a shorter lifetime…we should have decades left to solve the pit production problems and I think using aging as an excuse to go back right now is sort of a red herring.”
For Spaulding, the budget increase isn’t about replacing old pits. It’s about making new ones for new and different kinds of nuclear weapons. “The new budget really corresponds to a new push to accelerate everything in the nuclear complex that this administration has increasingly emphasized,” he said.
A leaked NNSA memo dated February 11, 2026 from Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs David Beck outlined a plan for new weapons aimed at “enhancing American nuclear dominance.” The memo was first published by the Los Alamos Study Group, an independent community think tank.
The Beck memo outlined an ambitious project for plutonium pit production. “Complete near-term modifications at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4) to enable production of 100 pits and achieve a sustained production rate of at least 60 pits per year and begin production,” it said. “Position the Savannah River Site (SRS) to facilitate expanded pit production at PF-4 until Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) achieves full operations.”
Spaulding said that getting LANL to produce 60 pits a year at a sustained rate was going to be difficult. “They were already going to be struggling to get to 30 in the next few years. It's not clear that 60 is feasible,” he said. “I don't think that LANL is incapable of doing that if they choose to do it, but it's putting a lot of additional strain on a system that was already struggling to meet half the requirement.”
Spaulding also pointed out an interesting line in the Beck memo that seemed to call for new weapon designs. “They’re adding new requirements to LANL. One of those is to demonstrate what they call two new ‘novel Rapid Capability’ weapon systems, and for LANL to produce what they call ‘design-for-manufacture’ pits.’”
Spaulding said he interpreted these new tasks as the federal government asking America’s nuclear scientists to figure out how to get new weapons from the drawing board to prototype fast. “I think one of the things they’re thinking about is to be able to have increased flexibility in the 2030s to be able to produce different kinds of warheads,” he said. “We’re seeing calls for next generation hard and deeply buried target capabilities…it really seems like NNSA is shifting their philosophy from life extension and refurbishment…to all new production. This boost is really to try to get this industrial base moving faster than it is.”
Xiaodon Liang, a senior policy analyst for the Arms Control Association, also interpreted the increased plutonium pit budget as a sign of a new nuclear arms race. “There are new warhead designs that are currently in the early stages of production, if not late stages of development. One of those is the W87-1, which is a new warhead for the Sentinel,” he told 404 Media.
The Sentinel is a new intercontinental ballistic missile that’s set to replace the Minutemans that dot underground silos across the United States. The Sentinel program is billions over budget, will require the digging of new ICBM silos, and has no end in sight.
Liang pointed to the W93 warhead, another new design that’s set to be used in submarine-launched ballistic missiles. “I think the case has been even weaker as to why the existing warheads don't satisfy requirements,” he said. “And I would add that part of the argument for the W93 is that the British were very strongly in favor of it because the British are reliant on our sea based systems for their own deterrence. So they lobbied very hard for the W93 and the case for why the United States needs it was never made clear.”
Both the United States and Russia have about 5,000 nuclear weapons each. None of the other nuclear countries have anywhere close to that number. Experts estimate that China has the next biggest stockpile with only around 400 warheads. It begs the question: Why do we need more? Why make more plutonium pits at all?
“People are pointing at China as an emerging threat. There’s a widespread assumption in the defense world—which UCS disagrees with—that China is necessarily seeking parity with the United States in terms of numbers of weapons,” Spaulding said.
The amount of nuclear weapons began to plummet at the end of the Cold War. A series of treaties between Russia and the United States limited the amount of deployed weapons and both countries began to decommission the weapons. But all those treaties are gone now and global instability—largely driven by America and Russia—has many countries reconsidering their anti-nuclear stance.
The US military is worried it won’t have enough nukes to deter everyone who might get one in the future. It’s also worried about hypersonic weapons, AI-driven innovations, and nukes from space. “That doesn’t mean it’s still a game of numbers,” Spaulding said. “That sort of simplistic thinking that applied to the Cold War with the arms race against Russia was, well, if they have X number, we have to have X number. Once there's sort of horizontal proliferation across nine nuclear armed states. It's not clear that this sort of tit for tat numbers game works the same way. More and more weapons are not the solution to nuclear proliferation elsewhere, that doesn't lead us to a safer state in the world.”
Matthew Gault
That hasn’t stopped the US from throwing billions at making new nuclear weapons triggers and asking its scientists to step up production. But it’s unclear if that’s even possible in the short term. In 1992, when the US was making 1,000 pits a year, it did so because of a plant in Rocky Flats, Colorado. The plant closed because the FBI raided it. The plant was an environmental disaster that killed its workers and irradiated the surrounding community. But it met quotas.
Since the closure, America’s nuclear scientists have worked on preserving the pits they had instead of making new ones. “I think the feeling is that science based stockpile stewardship was not enough because it did not leave us with the capability to respond to geopolitical change,” Spaulding said. “I think it’s being looked at quite a bit as an indicator of how well the United States is meeting this new aspiration even if the goals and quantities we’re setting are completely unbounded by reality, which is one of the problems right now.”
The budget and NNSA call for South Carolina’s SRS to manufacture the bulk of the plutonium pits in the future. But it’s unclear if that will ever happen. The ACA’s Liang is skeptical. “The key unanswered question is whether the Savannah River Site will ever come online,” he said. “The current estimate is 2035 for when it’ll reach construction’s end.” Current projections predict the pit factory will cost $30 billion, making it one of the most expensive buildings ever constructed in the US.
All that money and time making new plutonium is less that goes towards other projects. “There’s ongoing remediation work that the state of New Mexico says should be done, that the NNSA has not performed because it claims ‘we are expanding pit production, we can’t do this until later,’” Liang said.
“Los Alamos will start producing pits at some number soon. The question to me is, at what cost. Not just financial cost,” he said. “If you look at the DOE budget, what is getting cut? The Trump administration has tried to cut $400 million from the Environmental Management budget twice in the last two years."
Ramping up pit production will lead to more radioactive waste that the DOE will be responsible for cleaning up. “We know from historical experience when pits were produced before…that this is a dangerous and hazardous process. Plutonium is radioactive. It’s a carcinogenic material. It results in large amounts of waste…which present human and environmental risks, not only to the workers who will be charged with carrying this out but to communities around these facilities,” Spaulding said at a press conference on Wednesday.
The United States spends billions of dollars every year cleaning up its radioactive messes, including around Rocky Flats where it once produced most of its plutonium pits. If this budget is approved, and it looks like it will be, then America will spend less money on helping people poisoned by nuclear weapons and more money making new ones.
Update 4/22/26: An earlier version of this story stated an incorrect statistic regarding cuts to environmental management. We've updated the piece with the correct information.
