WASHINGTON, D.C. – Contractors in the nuclear weapons complex have come out of the shutdown relatively unscathed, although it could take months to catch up on work around the Department of Energy sites, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) told the Exchange Monitor this week.
Fleischmann, chair of the House Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee, shared his thoughts Monday on the sidelines of the American Nuclear Society’s 2025 Winter Conference and Expo in Washington. The Republican lawmaker praised DOE contractors but blasted Democrats for initiating what turned out to be the nation’s longest federal government shutdown.
“Fortunately, due to good stewardship on [contractors’] part, and they reported back to me, they had sufficient reserves to weather this,” Fleischmann, whose district abuts the Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said to the Exchange Monitor. “However, some have taken steps, understandably, not to furlough people, but to curtail hours in some places, legitimately move money around, and I give them very high marks for weathering a situation that’s not of their making and should never have happened.”
The government shutdown lasted 43 days, ending with President Donald Trump Wednesday night signing a continuing resolution (CR) to get funding rolling until Jan. 30, when the House and Senate will hope to either get all 12 appropriations bills done or will vote on another stopgap budget package. As a consequence of the lapse in funding, the National Nuclear Security Administration, DOE’s semi-autonomous agency in charge of maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, furloughed 1,400 employees, or 80% of its workforce.
Many were also furloughed at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and its cleanup contractors.
Fleischmann added that in his 15 years of being in the House he’d “never been more outraged, angry, upset, at this government shutdown, which should have never happened. It’s indefensible, it’s wrong. And the sad part about this is the infusion of additional monies once we get back open, is going to be slow.” He also said contractors told him “it can be 45 to 60 days before they get their infusion of funds.”
“This is going to possibly take as much as six months to a year to get back to normal when you cut off those funds, even when they begin,” Fleischmann said. “Some of the harm can be dealt with immediately with money, but there’s money that’s got to come through the pipeline.”
“We should have kept it open with a clean CR and keep negotiating,” Fleischmann said. “This has been very hurtful.”
When asked if he would take part in the healthcare negotiations that Democrats cited as their main reason for not voting for the CR, Fleischmann said, “I’m gonna continue to focus on the appropriation process,” but he was “never adverse to discussing subsidies or any other issue that the minority or the majority wanted to do.”
“What I did not want to do was to bring it in as an extraneous, false issue to the appropriations process, hurt the appropriations process as they did and shut it down,” Fleischmann added. “At a minimum, you’ve gone through the pain of a shutdown. Now we’re not gonna be able to get to a budget until probably late January. All of this could have been avoided. So again, they have brought an extraneous issue for purely political purposes. You never shut the government down. I think what we really need to do is look at some legislative methods to try to ensure that this never happens again to the American people.”
Republicans currently control majorities in both the House and the Senate.
CBS News this week put out a summary of the 15 times funding has lapsed since 1980. The rundown indicates government shutdowns have happened under presidents of both parties and, more often than not, with Republican majorities in at least one House of Congress. The second-longest shutdown was 35 days and occurred during Trump’s first term.
Wayne Barber contributed to this story.