Booz Allen Hamilton Is an Example of Washington's Economic Boom Lining the roadways out to Dulles Airport in Virginia, filling the many boxy office buildings near the Pentagon, and adding to the sprawl heading north from the city far into the Maryland suburbs are countless private companies reliant on taxpayer-financed government contracts that have helped transform Washington into one of the richest areas in the country. But few are as successful as Booz Allen Hamilton, the government contractor whose employee, Edward J. Snowden, has acknowledged leaking national security documents revealing details of the government's extensive surveillance programs. Businesses in Washington, Virginia and Maryland have become increasingly dependent on government money over the years, and as of 2011 federal spending accounted for 39 percent of the region's economic output, according to a report from Stephen S. Fuller, the director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. The biggest beneficiaries include the armies of contract workers for the government's sprawling national security empire. Of the 10 biggest local employers in the region (besides the federal government) last year, four were major military, aerospace and cybersecurity contractors (the Science Applications International Corporation, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen and Lockheed Martin), according to an annual list compiled by The Washington Post. Others in the top 10, like the University of Maryland at College Park, receive taxpayer money for a variety of federal projects, and even those that do not are still benefiting from the increasing spending power of local residents employed through government money. The same goes for the smaller employers, like restaurants, gyms, shops, and dry cleaners that serve the growing professional-class work force in the area. The contractors also tend to earn much more than their public payroll counterparts, which helps drive up local household incomes. Today, of the 50 most populous metropolitan areas in the country, the Washington area has one of the highest concentrations of high-income households. The Washington area also dominates the list of counties with the highest median household incomes. National security contractors are not the only local residents getting rich as a result of government policy: in recent years, the stimulus package and other new laws and regulations (like the Affordable Care Act) and proposed laws (like tax reform) have sustained and improved the careers of lobbyists, lawyers and consultants. Government-related money is one reason the Washington economy was relatively insulated from the recession and its difficult aftermath. In both 2011 and 2012, in a ranking of the top 50 metropolitan areas, residents of the Washington area expressed the most confidence in the American economy, according to Gallup. That optimism probably reflects these residents" own job situations. The unemployment rate in the Washington metro area encompassing Northern Virginia and parts of Maryland and West Virginia was just 5 percent in April (not seasonally adjusted), the most recent month for which data are available. Even at its recent business cycle peak, in early 2010, it was just 7 percent. By comparison, the country's jobless rate peaked at a seasonally adjusted rate of 10 percent, and is now 7.6 percent. Of course, there is concern that the metropolitan area's glory days are over, as Congress cut $85 billion from military and domestic programs on March 1 for the fiscal year ending Sept. The Center for Regional Analysis estimates that the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland will collectively lose 330,819 jobs as a result of the so-called sequestration, accounting for about 21 percent of total job cuts nationwide. Booz Allen - which earned $1.3 billion, or 23 percent of its total revenue, in the last fiscal year from intelligence work - might be particularly worried about the federal spigot's being tightened after this new security breach. Not surprisingly, Booz Allen's stock price fell 2.56 percent on Monday. In its recent annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May, the company said that the main risks to its business include changes to "U.S. government spending and mission priorities" (like the sequester) and "mishandling or the perception of mishandling of sensitive information, such as our failure to maintain the confidentiality of the existence of our business relationships with certain of our clients or a failure to maintain adequate protection against security breaches," which "could harm our relationship with U.S. government agencies." The company also said that it had already reduced the number of its employees in the previous fiscal year by about 500 people, bringing the total head count to 24,455 people, "due to modestly lower demand in an uncertain federal budget environment."