Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, in a press conference Monday in Nevada., said all of the federal employees at Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) had been furloughed.
Wright spoke in two press conferences in Nevada Monday, one being in Las Vegas and one being at the physical site of NNSS in Mercury, Nev. north of Las Vegas.
“Unfortunately I’m here in far less than ideal circumstances,” Wright said in the press conference posted on X by DOE. He went on to say “virtually all of our federal employees that work at this office here” at NNSS were part of the 1,400 workers furloughed at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) as part of the government shutdown.
“This has never happened before. We’ve never furloughed workers in the NNSA,” Wright said, adding that while they tried to “stretch” the funding, “this is as long as we’ve been able to fund federal workers.”
Since the majority of the work at Nevada is from contractors and NNSS has over 3,000 workers at the site, that equates to 68 federal workers, meaning “all of the federal workers that we have here,” that did not return to work Monday, Wright said.
Wright said that DOE and NNSA have come up with “creative ways to keep funding to keep our contractors employed, at least to the end of the month.” When a reporter asked what will happen when that funding runs out, Wright said, “if the creative extra funding we’ve found, if it runs out,” then “tens of thousands of critical workers” are at risk.
In Wright’s speech, he thanked Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) for voting for a continuing resolution, which would keep the government open by extending funding from the previous fiscal year. “This is a [Joe] Biden budget that has been continued on through continuing resolutions to today,” Wright said, adding that bipartisan votes for the budget continue to happen in Congress. “Senator Cortez Masto, I thank her for her courage and for standing with our workers here in Nevada and with our country’s national security.”
Wright added that Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen (D), who has been a “stalwart supporter” of the workers at NNSS, “her last vote she abstained. I think she wants to vote with us, I think she’s going to be part of opening the government.”