Sandia is not in house government, it is an FFRDC or federally funded research and development center, which are weird quasi governmental entities that are mean

Sandia is not in house government, it is an FFRDC or federally funded research and development center, which are weird quasi governmental entities that are meant to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of in house government red tape, and the downsides of short term contracts. Think faster hiring/firing and higher pay than government, but longer term funding and goals than contractors. All the national labs are FFRDCs and there are a few others. My dad worked for one for decades - the MITRE corporation, which is a nonprofit, and interestingly enough got the first .org domain. They also run CVE, and do a variety of R&D and legacy systems work, most notably air traffic control. They also entered vehicles in the DARPA challenges in the aughts, though did not do well.