GAO: NNSA Labs Performed Nearly $15 Billion in Reimbursable Work From 2019–24

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s outside reimbursable work is far from a side business: its labs, plants and sites performed nearly $15 billion in Strategic Partnership Projects from fiscal 2019 through 2024, and the Government Accountability Office said scaling that work back because of capacity pressures could disrupt other federal missions while also raising NNSA’s own costs.

In a report released Thursday, GAO said, “From fiscal year 2019 through fiscal year 2024, NNSA performed almost $15 billion in SPP.” Annual volume was generally steady at between $2 billion and $3 billion in constant fiscal 2024 dollars. Sandia National Laboratories accounted for more than half of the total, with almost $8 billion over the six-year period and between 49% and 60% of annual SPP activity each year. The Department of Defense was the largest sponsor, accounting for $7.6 billion, or about 51% of total reimbursed SPP costs.

NNSA is a separately organized agency within the Energy Department responsible for the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and related national security work. Strategic Partnership Projects, formerly known as Work for Others, let NNSA sites perform reimbursable work for other federal agencies and nonfederal entities using the enterprise’s specialized facilities and technical expertise. GAO said DOE policy requires sites to recover the full cost of that work through partner reimbursement. “DOE requires NNSA sites to recover the full cost of the SPP through reimbursement from partners,” the report’s highlights said.

That reimbursement matters beyond the projects themselves because it helps pay for overhead tied to facilities, infrastructure and operations. In fiscal 2024, SPP reimbursements covered $1.368 billion in indirect costs, equal to 52% of the $2.66 billion in SPP reimbursements shown in GAO’s table. GAO said that if NNSA had to reduce SPP because of limited capacity, it would likely have to absorb more of those facility and infrastructure costs itself, increasing costs for its own programs.

GAO also found that the work supports missions across government, often in areas where NNSA capabilities are hard or impossible to replace elsewhere. The agency reviewed data from 2019 through 2024 and interviewed officials and partner agencies. It said all nine federal SPP partners it interviewed described the projects as essential. As the report put it, “all nine SPP federal partners GAO interviewed said SPP was essential to their ability to complete their mission.” GAO also said NNSA categorized most SPP agreements as related to national security.

The scale of the program is broad. GAO’s dataset included more than 20,000 SPP agreements from 2019 through 2024, with about 2,000 to 4,000 agreements enterprise-wide each year. The Kansas City National Security Campus posted the fastest growth, with its number of SPP agreements rising 279%, from 219 in fiscal 2019 to 830 in fiscal 2024.

Congress asked GAO to examine the program in the Senate committee report accompanying the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2025. The review came amid concern that NNSA’s growing stockpile sustainment and modernization workload could leave less room for outside reimbursable work, even though that work helps sustain the facilities and specialized capabilities that NNSA and its partners both rely on.