Scott DesJarlais Billionaires & Big Business Military Tennessee

Scott DesJarlais Writes America's Nuclear Weapons Budget. Eleven Companies That Build the Weapons Gave Him $94,000.

He chairs the House subcommittee with jurisdiction over nuclear weapons, missile defense and military space. On June 4 he read out a bill boosting four specific programs. Lockheed, Northrop, RTX and L3Harris hold all four contracts — and all four fund his campaign.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

Scott DesJarlais Writes America's Nuclear Weapons Budget. Eleven Companies That Build the Weapons Gave Him $94,000.

On June 4, 2026, Scott DesJarlais stood up at a House Armed Services Committee markup and read a short statement into the record. Almost nobody covered it. It is one of the most valuable pieces of paper in Washington.

DesJarlais chairs the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. That subcommittee holds the pen on nuclear weapons, strategic missiles, nuclear command and control, missile defense, military space systems, and the Energy Department programs that keep the nuclear stockpile running. He took the gavel in January 2025.

What that means in practice is simple. Once a year, DesJarlais decides which of these programs get more money and which ones don't. Then the full committee votes on what he wrote.

What he put in the bill

Here is what DesJarlais said his subcommittee's piece of the 2027 defense bill does, in his own words:

"The subcommittee's Fiscal Year 2027 mark is the product of bipartisan cooperation and continues many of our longstanding efforts, such as advancing nuclear modernization, reforming the national security space enterprise, and enhancing missile defense."

Then he got specific. The bill, he said, "authorizes full funding to keep modernizing the nation's nuclear forces," supports "significant increase in funding" for the Energy Department's nuclear production capabilities, and improves "acquisition flexibility for the Air Force's ICBM programs."

On missile defense, he named four things by name:

space-based sensing
development of the Next-Generation Interceptor
Standard Missile 3 – Block II-B procurement
accelerating the Glide Phase Interceptor program

And he closed by saying he was "happy to support the historic increase in funding for the Space Force specifically."

Those aren't abstractions. Every single one of them is a contract. And every single one of those contracts belongs to a company that writes checks to Scott DesJarlais.

Line by line, program to donor

Let's take his list in order.

The Next-Generation Interceptor — the missile meant to replace America's homeland missile-defense interceptors — belongs to Lockheed Martin, which beat Northrop Grumman for the job in 2024. Lockheed Martin's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this election cycle, including a $5,000 check on February 25, 2026 — while he was writing this bill.

Standard Missile-3 is built by Raytheon, a division of RTX. RTX's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this cycle. Its $5,000 check landed the same day Lockheed's did.

The Glide Phase Interceptor — the one DesJarlais wrote extra money into the bill to speed up — belongs to Northrop Grumman. Northrop's PAC has given him $10,000 this cycle, $5,000 of it on February 9, 2026. Northrop is also the prime contractor on the Air Force's Sentinel ICBM — the program whose "acquisition flexibility" DesJarlais wrote a legislative fix for in the very same bill.

Space-based sensing means missile-tracking satellites. L3Harris won an $843 million contract in December 2025 to build eighteen of them. L3Harris's PAC has given DesJarlais $8,000 this cycle, with its most recent check dated June 29 — twenty-five days after he read that statement.

The Energy Department's "production capabilities" he boosted are the nuclear weapons plants. The largest of them, the Kansas City National Security Campus, is run by Honeywell and makes about 80% of the non-nuclear parts in every American nuclear warhead. Honeywell's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this cycle.

The "historic increase" for the Space Force flows to the companies that launch and build for it. SpaceX's PAC has given him $5,000. Blue Origin's has given him $10,000.

Add in General Atomics ($10,000), Leidos ($10,000), Boeing ($8,500) and BWX Technologies ($2,500) — all of them Pentagon and nuclear contractors — and eleven weapons and aerospace companies have put $94,000 into DesJarlais's campaign account this cycle.

Why $94,000 is a lot of money to this particular congressman

For most members of Congress, $94,000 is a rounding error. For DesJarlais it isn't.

He has raised about $1.19 million for this election — one of the smaller war chests in the House. More than half of it, $610,849, came from PACs rather than people. Just $8,659 came from small grassroots donors. That's seven-tenths of one percent. He ranks 224th out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

So the arithmetic is this: eleven companies whose programs he personally funds in his own bill have given him roughly eleven times what every small donor in Tennessee's 4th District gave him combined.

This is a pattern, not an accident

DesJarlais isn't alone in this. It's how the defense budget gets written.

Ken Calvert, who chairs the subcommittee that drafts the entire Pentagon budget, took more than $200,000 from weapons makers in three months while Americans were dying in Trump's Iran war. John Carter, who writes the military construction budget, has eleven Pentagon contractors among his twenty biggest PAC donors. Brian Babin, who chairs the committee that writes NASA's marching orders, has taken $261,250 from six space and defense contractors.

The gavel is the product. The money follows the gavel.

What this costs the rest of us

While DesJarlais was authorizing "full funding" for nuclear modernization and a "historic increase" for the Space Force, the veterans in his own district were being told the VA was closing the only clinic in McMinnville — the one more than 2,000 of them used. He said his office got no warning.

That is the trade DesJarlais makes, and he has made it for fifteen years. Nothing in the record says he is wrong about the threats from China or Russia. But there is no version of this where a congressman writes a bill enriching eleven companies, takes $94,000 from those same eleven companies while he's writing it, and asks us to believe the two facts are unrelated.

He didn't disclose the overlap. He didn't recuse himself from anything. He just read the statement and moved on, because in Washington this isn't a scandal. It's the job.

It should be a scandal.