The administration of Pres. Donald Trump wants to boost by billions of dollars the federal government’s production of plutonium pits for nuclear weapons.

The proposal, part of the administration’s budget blueprint for the 2021 fiscal year, would sustain a large atomic arsenal potentially for decades and, according to one nuclear watchdog group, risks fueling a runaway strategic arms race.

The White House is asking Congress to approve $19.8 billion for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration for 2021. The NNSA got just $16.5 billion in 2020.

The NNSA is one of just a few winners in Trump’s $4.8-trillion budget, which proposes to cut medical spending and slash the Environmental Protection Agency in order to maintain the same elevated level of defense spending that Congress approved for 2020.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut for corporations and the wealthy have resulted in trillion-dollar annual federal budget deficits despite the relatively strong economy. Job growth, while slower than growth under Pres. Barack Obama, has kept unemployment low, although many of the jobs are part-time and do not pay well.

Economic problems have proved to be a drag on federal spending. But Trump wants to spare the nuclear-weapons establishment from the wider budgetary cutbacks.

“A large part of the increase for DOE’s nuclear-weapons department, the National Nuclear Security Administration, is to support new and unjustified facilities to replace all the plutonium pits in all old and new-design weapons at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico,” Savannah River Site Watch, a nuclear watchdog group, explained in a release.

The 2011 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty limits both the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads on 700 deployed rockets and bombers. But both countries keep thousands of additional nukes in storage.

“NNSA evidently wants to keep about 4,000 nuclear weapons through the end of the century and make new pits for all of them,” Savannah River Site Watch stated.

But the NNSA has enough older pits in storage at its Pantex site in Texas -- around 15,000, according to Savannah River Site Watch -- indefinitely to maintain America’s nuclear deterrent. Spending billions of dollars to build new pits amounts to corporate welfare, Savannah River Site Watch director Tom Clements wrote.

“We will continue to fight the proposed Plutonium Bomb Plant at SRS and work to convince Congress that it is unnecessary and that it must be deauthorized and funding revoked,” Clements stated.

“New pit production proposed for SRS and Los Alamos ... is causing havoc with the DOE budget and must not be pursued. DOE must pull back from new pit production and must first thoroughly review pit lifetime and examine reuse of over 15,000 pits now in storage at DOE’s Pantex site.”

Congress ultimately approves federal spending. Lawmakers already have declared “dead on arrival” several of Trump’s agency budgets for 2021.

The U.S. Navy, for example, is asking to slash ship construction and accelerate the decommissioning of existing ships, while the U.S. Air Force wants to retire more than 100 warplanes including dozens of A-10 attack jets, B-1 bombers, Global Hawk spy drones and aerial tankers. Congress is sure to push back against both agencies’ budget blueprints.

It’s unclear how much money Congress will give the NNSA to build new plutonium pits. But the administration’s proposals does speak to its priorities.

Trump has overseen a rapid and reckless dismantling of existing treaties and international accords aimed at limiting the world’s nuclear arsenals. At Trump’s urging, the United States has scrapped limits on intermediate-range nuclear-capable missiles while also moving to deploy “easier-to-use” low-yield nukes.

Trump has one year to sign an extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The accord expires on Feb. 5, 2021 unless Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin both sign an extension.

“If the treaty expires, there will be no constraints on U.S. or Russian strategic arsenals for the first time since 1972,” wrote Matt Korda and Hans Kristensen, analysts with the Federation of American Scientists. “It would remove caps on how many strategic nuclear missiles and bombers the two sides can own and how many warheads that are carried on them.”

“This means that Russia could quickly upload about a thousand new warheads onto its deployed missile arsenal -- without adding a single new missile. The United States could upload even more because it has more missiles and bombers than Russia. And both sides could begin to increase their arsenals, risking a new nuclear arms race.”

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.