Posted by Scott Kovac – Sandia National Laboratories, has one of the Department Of Energy’s (DOE’s) largest annual budgets and the fiscal year 2020 (FY20) Congressional Budget Request shows continued military priorities for the Lab. There are two components of Sandia’s annual budget – work for DOE (with a $2.4 billion request for FY20) and ‘Work For Others’ (with an annual request of $1.2 billion). Sandia’s work for DOE centers around nuclear weapons engineering. ‘Work for Others’ (WFO) is work done for federal agencies other than the DOE and for non-federal entities. An annual total budget of $3.6 billion puts Sandia’s budget second only behind Washington Headquarters among DOE sites.
Sandia’s total budget is larger than Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which has an FY20 total budget request of $2.8 billion including WFO. The difference between the two budgets has to do primarily with Sandia’s WFO, which is almost 5 times LANL’s WFO budget of $250 million. Sandia’s largest WFO customer is the Department of Defense which spent over $950 million at Sandia in FY 2018.
When it comes to nuclear weapons component research, development, and production, Sandia and LANL have similar budgets with Sandia planning to spend $1.99 billion in FY20 while LANL looks to spend $1.97 billion. LANL’s nuclear weapons activities represents 71% of its FY20 total proposed budget, while Sandia’s nuclear weapons work represents 55% of its total budget. However, if the 26% of Sandia’s budget that is Department Of Defense WFO is taken into account, then Sandia’s total budget for military work is at least 81%.
See the Sandia (and all DOE sites) DOE Laboratory Tables here
See our condensed DOE Lab Tables here
See Sandia’s own FY18 budget numbers here