Much of US intelligence work is done by private contractors

Make us feel safe.

That was the implied message Americans sent to Washington in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon.

And even if those exact words were not spoken, Washington got the message and responded with an explosion in the number of people employed in intelligence gathering, the number of private contractors working for the government in security endeavors and the billions of dollars being spent to thwart attacks against Americans at home and abroad. The ways in which intelligence gathering is being pursued have also expanded exponentially.

A team of Washington Post reporters, headed by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, a 30-year veteran reporter covering the intelligence community, spent two years investigating the U.S. intelligence establishment, combing through mountains of public records.

We cannot adequately summarize in a few inches the many pages of reportage The Post’s efforts have provided, but here’s a taste.

The Post identified 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence.

There are an estimated 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, of which 265,000 are contractors.

More than 500 of the private companies doing top secret work came into being after 2001, and many of those that had already existed have grown like Topsy.

A false economy

The government turned to private contractors for speed and economy, but a 2008 study published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence suggests that private contractors cost more. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told The Post that federal workers cost the government 25 percent less than contractors.

The increasing dependence on private contractors escalates intelligence costs in other ways. In tens of thousands of cases, the government trains specialists either in civilian or military positions, only to see them lured away by private contractors — who can pay them more because the companies are charging the government for their services (and making a profit in the process).

With so many agencies and so many contractors in play, the right hand often doesn’t know what the left is doing, resulting in expensive and wasteful duplication of service.

Intelligence gathering is necessarily expensive, and no other country is more involved in such work than the United States. No one would suggest trying to do it on the cheap.

But the burgeoning intelligence industry has a danger of not only being expensive and inefficient, it has the potential to grow into a lobbying force that becomes so powerful that any effort to rein it in will be defeated.

Almost nine years after 9/11, it is time to reassert a national goal of keeping America and Americans as safe as possible, but it is also time to reassess our methodology.