The National Nuclear Security Administration’s six major management and operations contractors have so far reported about $140 million in reimbursements for paid leave granted to people who could not work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, an agency spokesperson said this week.
The tally includes reimbursements claimed from March 27 through Aug. 31 under Section 3610 of the CARES Act — the COVID-19 bailout bill that became law in late March — and counts only payouts to the management and operations contracts for: the Kansas City National Security Campus in Missouri; the Pantex and Y-12 sites in Texas and Tennessee; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California; the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico; and the Nevada National Security Site.
Pantex and Y-12 are managed under a single contract, but the other sites are managed under separate contracts.
A pair of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) support service contracts awarded in 2018, one held by SOC and another by Covenant Park, were also cleared to file for CARES 3610 reimbursement but had not done so as of Aug. 31, the most recent day for which data were available, the spokesperson said Thursday.
Cares 3610 is not the only way Department of Energy and NNSA contractors can tap into the COVID-19 stimulus funding signed into law this year amid the global pandemic, but it is one of the primary mechanisms that the broader DOE leveraged to help industry grapple with an operational quagmire that is more or less unprecedented in the history of the nuclear weapons complex.
Congress extended CARES 3610, and 2020 budgets, through Dec. 11 as part of the stopgap budget that President Donald Trump signed into law last week. Almost as soon as Trump signed the bill, the Secretary of Energy cleared agency contractors to continue 3610 billings.
As before, contractors may not bill the government for more than 40 hours per week of paid leave per employee, including sick leave, under CARES 3610. The law let DOE tap into the first round of CARES Act funding, plus any subsequent COVID-19 bailouts.
The NNSA first added CARES 3610 clases to its management and operations contracts in April.
NNSA nuclear-weapons production sites have been running their usual three shifts throughout most of the pandemic, but the nuclear weapons labs — Lawrence Livermore in California, and Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico — have mostly kept about half of their workforce home since COVID-19 broke out across the country.
