Another Billion for SAIC... Zzzzzz

A little bad publicity in a recent Vanity Fair doesn't seem to have hurt San Diego-based defense megalith SAIC. Despite Vanity Fair's use of a wealth of ominous adjectives to describe the company and allusions to the military-industrial-complex, SAIC is going strong and has won a new Pentagon contract potentially worth nearly $1 billion, according to Information Week (Note: Information Week only mentions the SAIC award, but the company's press release says that it's one of four companies that may share work under the program).

SAIC, largely a defense services company, successfully stayed below the media's radar screen until the Vanity Fair article delved into everything from the founder's alleged penchant for one former employee called his "baby boys," to the company's work on the flawed NSA Trailblazer* system. Vanity Fair* doesn't quite find the proverbial "smoking gun" in SAIC, but the article makes an important point about government outsourcing:

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"—they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it involves the most sensitive matters of national security. The Founding Fathers may have argued eloquently for a government of laws, not of men, but what we've got instead is a government of body shops.

True to form*, Information Week* describes SAIC's latest win -- a rather ambiguous award -- as a contract to provide "the department's Joint Test and Evaluation Program Office with a range of technical services, including integration of IT systems, performance monitoring, and validation of testing methods."

-- Sharon Weinberger