B90% of Livermore Lab Budget Now for Nuclear Weapons Activities; Renewable Energy Program Abolished – $0 Requested
The Trump Administration’s Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) for Livermore Laboratory has been released and it tops $2.9 billion for the first time! The Lab’s overall budget is up 16% from last year.
Tri-Valley CAREs has long been advocating for Livermore Lab to grow its civilian science mission and shrink its weapons focus, and for decades now there has been a small, but lauded, Energy Efficiency and Renewables division at the Lab.
Instead, this year’s budget request shows a big increase in nuclear weapons activities, with cuts to almost every other category. The budget requests for energy efficiency and renewable energy, along with nuclear energy programs have been reduced to $0.
These stark differences show the government is throwing money at the new nuclear arms race at the expense of civilian science that could help or solve some of the world’s problems, like climate change, biodiversity collapse, renewable energy technology and contamination remediation.
As you see in the pie chart, almost 90% of the Lab’s budget is for Nuclear Weapons Activities, which is up 12% over last year’s enacted budget. Much of this funding goes to developing two new nuclear warheads.
In the President’s budget request, it is revealed that the Lab is getting a massive increase in funding for its work on the Submarine Launched Cruise Missile – Nuclear (SLCM-N) warhead—up from $12.8 million in FY25 to $81.17 million in FY26. This warhead was previously planned as the W80-4 “Alt,” but due to delays and the risk of major cost overruns, the warhead is back in “selection phase.”
We speculate that some of the funding for the SLCM-N warhead at the Lab will go to support the re-design/new warhead selection, where the Lab is analyzing how it will combine aspects of existing warheads to piecemeal together a warhead for to be combined with a new cruise missile, designed for deployment on Navy attack submarines.
Whatever they choose, the new SLCM-N was said to have “zero value” according to the Defense Department’s briefings, and it could be uniquely destabilizing by provoking further nuclear arms racing, while also proving to be very costly – taking a decade or more to develop.
Additionally, Livermore Lab’s newly designed W87-1 will be the first wholly new warhead developed since the end of full-scale nuclear testing in 1992, and will require new plutonium pits. In fact, it will be the recipient of up to 800 new plutonium pits set to be delivered by the government’s enhanced Plutonium Pit Production plan.
Tri-Valley CAREs, Savannah River Site Watch and Nuclear Watch New Mexico were plaintiffs in a litigation brought against the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) under the National Environmental Policy Act arguing that the agency failed to evaluate the “programmatic” impacts of plutonium pit production. The judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor as the law requires NNSA to analyze in an environmental impact statement the full impacts of its plutonium pit production plans across the nuclear weapons complex nationwide, including the impacts at Livermore Lab, which it did not do.
As of this writing, this Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement is currently open for “scoping” public comments and the Draft is tentatively scheduled for release in spring of 2026.
The FY26 budget request shows that Livermore Lab is set for a 16% increase in funding over what was enacted last year for “Enterprise Pit Production Support” to $98.96 million. The work is already happening at Livermore, and the potential impact of this new activity was not directly analyzed in any NEPA document.
Let’s compare the funds for Nuclear Weapons Activities to the Lab’s budget request for (non-weapons) Science, which has been cut to a mere 0.8% of the total. As you can see from the pie chart, Energy Efficiency and Renewables program at the Lab has been completely abolished- with $0 requested. Additionally, the Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation program has shrunken to less than 10% of the Lab’s total budget request.
This is a budget request that supports and accelerates a new global nuclear arms race. This dynamic becomes especially apparent given the lack of consideration given by the request to public safety and the environment. For example, the budget to decontaminate and decommission the “High-Risk Excess Facilities” at the Lab, which are known to pose a radioactive and toxic risk to workers and the public, receives $0 for the 2nd year in a row. And the requested amount for cleanup of the Lab’s soil and groundwater contamination, a process that has been ongoing for 35+ years, remains stubbornly underfunded, with just a sliver of the overall budget.
Tri-Valley CAREs members have been raising the alarm in Washington, DC and locally about these concerns. Our work continues to push Livermore Lab away from nuclear weapons programs to civilian science and cleanup programs. While this budget request shows a clear prioritizing of nuclear weapons programs, we will continue to challenge this momentum.
Tri-Valley CAREs’ work in the coming months and years will seek to change what gets funded at Livermore Lab, and in doing so, achieve a safer, healthier future for our community. Join us!