Report: Los Alamos National Laboratory spent nearly $3 billion in New Mexico in FY25

LOS ALAMOS — The federal research site that developed the world’s first atomic bomb continues to have a profound economic impact on northern New Mexico more than eight decades after its famed inaugural director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, retired.

Los Alamos National Laboratory this month released its fiscal year 2025 economic impact report, which found that the research and development lab funneled roughly $2.9 billion of its $5.28 billion budget back into New Mexico in the form of salaries, gross receipts tax revenues and procurement contracts.

LANL employed a total of 16,487 people, excluding contractors, during its previous fiscal year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2024, through Sept. 30.

Of those employees, 5,402 were based in Los Alamos County, 4,089 were in Santa Fe County, 2,496 were in Rio Arriba County and 314 were in Taos County.

The lab also spent $752.5 million in procurements in New Mexico, $318 million of which went to New Mexico small businesses, according to the annual report.

The state overall earned approximately $141 million in gross receipts taxes from LANL spending over the previous fiscal year.

“To some extent, what you can see in the report is the cumulative impact of really what has been sustained growth over a period of years,” LANL Director Thom Mason said, speaking with the Journal during a trip to Washington D.C., this week.

While Mason said “growth has tempered some” since 2023, when LANL hired roughly 2,400 employees, the lab’s budget has grown steadily in recent years, from $5.24 billion in FY24 to $5.28 billion in the last fiscal year.

Mason said LANL is operating under a budget of roughly $5.3 billion in the current fiscal year. Its FY2027 budget will be released next month.

Despite a modest slowdown from a few years ago, Mason said the lab’s continued growth has been partly driven by sustained geopolitical tensions, along with “pretty strong bipartisan support for our national security missions.”

“That has translated into budget growth,” he said. “And there’s only two things we do with the funding we receive: We pay people and we buy stuff.”

LANL also operates a Small Business Assistance program, which helps for-profits in New Mexico make contact with the lab’s subject-matter experts and access its cutting-edge technologies at both Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, with an estimated doubling of value for every $1 in tax credit invested in the program.

Other LANL programs include its Technology Readiness Initiative and National, and a partnership with the National Nuclear Security Administration, allowing LANL to fund workforce development programs in engineering, machining, supply chain management and welding at 10 regional colleges, as well as career exploration programs that served more than 1,000 K-12 students.

LANL has also long been a source of scrutiny when it comes to the safety of its employees, some of whom handle toxic materials in the course of their duties.

According to a December report from the Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, two maintenance workers suffered skin exposures to plutonium in November, the same month an underground toxic chromium plume spread from LANL to Pueblo de San Ildefonso, according to the New Mexico Environment Department.

Over time, however, the rate of incidents at LANL has overall decreased, Mason said.

“We do high-consequence work,” said Mason, a physicist. “There’s no question about that. And that means we have to really pay attention to how we’re doing the work, and in fact, we’ve even got this kind of tagline ... that’s a bit of a mantra for the lab, which is, ‘How we do our work is as important as what we do.’”

John Miller is the Albuquerque Journal’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.