For 31 years, the 18-member JCAE (nine each from the House and Senate) had exclusive access to secret information about and wielded extraordinary legislative power over the US nuclear arsenal (and civilian nuclear energy programs), authorizing and later appropriating all funding. Case in point:
Stephen SchwartzToday in 1952, President Harry Truman secretly approved the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy’s (JCAE) hawkish 50-150 expansion program, ordering the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to arbitrarily increase production of weapons-grade plutonium by 50% and highly enriched uranium by 150%.