Information on the size of this workforce is difficult to come by, in part because the government likes to keep it secret. But most contractors provide figures on their cleared workforce in annual reports, media briefings, and press releases on new acquisitions, largely to impress government clients and potential investors. Here’s what I found in my study.
Before the merger, Leidos employed 9,400 people holding security clearances, according to figures on its website that were confirmed by a company spokesperson. They are now joined with about 2,000 cleared employees from Lockheed’s IT unit, for a total of 11,400 cleared professionals (in its story on the merger, The Washington Post said the total number was 13,000). I then took into account the company’s share of earnings from military, intelligence (27 percent of its revenue, according to Leidos), and civilian contracts, and concluded that the Leidos intelligence workforce now numbers about 8,000.
The figures for its competitors, using the same calculations, are equally staggering. Booz Allen deploys an intelligence workforce of 12,000 cleared personnel; CACI, 10,000; CSRA, 8,000; and SAIC, 6,600. Added together, the five companies employ 44,600 cleared personnel, which I rounded out to 45,000.
That’s nearly 80 percent of the total contractor workforce of 58,000 and about one-fifth of the total workforce of 183,000 civilians, contractors, and uniformed soldiers working in national and military intelligence.
“The marketplace is so concentrated that the service provider simply becomes too big to fail.” —David Isenberg
(As I did with Leidos, I ran my numbers by each company, with varying results. Booz said my estimate was “false and not accurate.” But it declined my request to interview Ronald Sanders, a Booz vice president who, as the ODNI’s “chief human capital officer,” presided over the office’s first inventory of contractor personnel in 2007. CSRA would “not participate in this opportunity.” SAIC said my figures were “accurate.” And CACI, per its usual practice, did not respond. None of them convinced me I was off-base.)
The aggregate workforce figures were derived from comparing the corporate statistics listed above to contractor data buried in US intelligence budgets. The number of contractors in intelligence was first revealed in 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked the details of a classified $52.6 billion budget for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) to the Post. That document showed the workforce at just over 107,000, while an accompanying graphic explained that some 20 percent of them—or 21,400—were contractors.
That total was down by 3 percent from 2011, when Senator Dianne Feinstein, then the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Congress that contractors accounted for 23 percent of the NIP workforce (the national budget covers the CIA, the intelligence units of the Department of Homeland Security, and 14 other government agencies, as well as the parts of the NSA and NGA that report directly to the president).
My second source for the IC’s employment figures is the budget for military intelligence programs (MIP), which funds operational and tactical programs carried out by the armed services and units of the NSA and the NGA that are under direct Pentagon command.
The declassified, “top line” version of the 2016 MIP budget ($17.9 billion) was released in February by the Defense Department, but it did not include any personnel numbers. However, in congressional testimony in 2013, when $18.6 billion was allocated for the MIP, the Pentagon said it employed a total intelligence workforce of 183,000, including civilian and contractor employees, plus uniformed military.
The Pentagon doesn’t break out contractor figures, however (such details “remain classified for national security reasons,” the DoD explains). So, to find those figures, I applied the same 20 percent breakdown found in Snowden’s leaked national intelligence document. That would mean a military intelligence contractor workforce of 36,600—a reasonable estimate that’s probably too low, I was told by several experts.
For the grand total, I added the national and military programs together, and came up with my conclusion that 58,000 contractors work in US intelligence. As you can see, by employing 45,000 of them, the five dominant “pure plays”—Leidos, Booz Allen, CSRA, SAIC, and CACI—control a huge chunk of the total.