TrendImpressive growth of people working in security sector

The U.S. security sector has been growing steadily in since 9/11, as thousands of people were hired to perform various security-related jobs. One example: The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was built practically from scratch, and now employs a workforce of 45,000, the limit set for the program by Congress (there are now voices in Congress calling for increasing this number). Yes, DHS inherited most of its 130,000 full-time employees from the twenty-two agencies and bureaus gathered to create the department, but it has also hired thousands more for tasks such as nuclear detection, management, and research and development. The department has also been expanding the number of employees at the agencies it absorbed — Border Patrol is a good example here. The mandated overhaul of the intelligence community requires that the administration increase that force by 10,000 over five years.

CQ’s Tim Starks writes that the number of uniformed and civilian military personnel has actually decreased since 2001, mainly because of some downsizing in the Navy and the Air Force. Civilian employment has shrunk by 6,000 people, to 606,000, while authorized military strength has gone down by nearly 37,000 since FY 2001, to 2.2 million in the current fiscal year. The Bush administration plans to increase the Army and Marines by a total of 92,000 during the next five years, mainly as a result of the personnel demands of the Iraq War.

The number of people working for the different U.S. intelligence agencies is classified, bu last year John Negroponte, currently the undersecretary of state but then director of national intelligence, said that almost 100,000 Americans work for intelligence agencies (Ronald Sanders, chief human capital officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said he did not think that number included contract employees). In a report accompanying its version of FY 2008 intelligence authorization bill, the Senate Intelligence Committee noted that the intelligence community’s personnel numbers had grown by 20 percent, placing the total increase at approximately 17,000. Plans calls for increasing this number. We know that the CIA by itself has hired more people in the last six years than in any similar period in its history, according to associate deputy director Michael Morrell.

Other agencies show similar trends:

* The Department of State saw its civil and foreign service ranks grow by 3,000 since late 2000, to approximately 17,000 now. The number of foreign service nationals working for the department has grown from approximately 30,000 to 37,000.

* The FBI has grown to approximately 30,000 employees since 9/11, although about half of its 4,000 new positions count as part of the intelligence community.

* The Office of Personnel Management has increased the number of people handling background checks for security clearances; the Department of Health and Human Services has hired people to respond to health emergencies, including those prompted by biological weapon attacks; and the Treasury recently founded a new office to track terrorist finances.

Note that contractors are not counted in most statistics. New York University professor Paul Light says that their numbers should be counted to get an accurate measure of the size of the federal government. Light estimates that in 2005, the Defense Department was using 1.5 million more contractors than it was just three years earlier. In Iraq, the Los Angeles Timesfigures the number of contractors for the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) at 180,000