What does $4.79 million look like to Lockheed Martin?

What does $4.79 million look like to Lockheed Martin Inc, the world’s biggest defense contractor?

Recently, Lockheed Martin (LM) agreed to pay a $4.79 million settlement to the federal government to settle Justice Department allegations that LM illegally used taxpayer money to lobby for an extension of its Sandia Labs management contract.LM was trying to get its $2.5 billion annual management and operating contract extended without any pesky competition.

What may seem like a large amount to us is just a slap on the wrist to LM, which has scored almost $300 billion in 169,345 different contracts with the US federal government since 2008.

The website USA Spending tells us that LM did $32 billion in business with the federal government in 2014. Of that, $25 billion was contracted with the Department of Defense and almost $3 billion with the Department of Energy (DOE). It is for DOE that LM runs Sandia and co-manages Pantex and Y-12 with Bechtel. These 3 sites are a large part of the US nuclear weapons complex. We are all familiar with LM’s defense contracting, but Lockheed Martin is also contracting to help build the nuclear warheads for the missiles and aircraft that it also builds, for example with the world’s first nuclear “smart” bomb, the B61-12. It’s one-stop nuclear war machine shopping.

Lockheed Martin also has its tentacles in many diverse federal agencies, for instance the Internal Revenue Service where it provides computer-related services. The taxpayer ultimately pays for all contracts.

The settlement on clearly illegal lobbying behavior represents only .015% of LM’s annual total federal contracts and just .16% of the DOE contracts for 2014.

To LM, $4.79 million must look like the cost of doing business.

Here are some Lockheed Martin numbers for 2014: