The latest ranking of contractors providing services to the federal government reveals that at least nine of the top 10 are tied to the Department of Defense and took in nearly $70 billion of the government’s money in 2010. Leading the pack as it has for the past 17 years is Lockheed Martin, with $17 billion, followed by Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics.

The top 27 contractors each received at least $1 billion in contracts from the government last year, with Number 100 on the list, Teledyne, getting $170 million. This reflects the enormous growth of government spending in general, and on outside vendors in particular, growing from $207 billion in 2000 to $535 billion last year.

This growth has spawned a maze of new construction, with 33 buildings under construction or already completed in the last ten years just for the government’s intelligence and surveillance work alone. And it has allowed some remarkable increases in income for workers providing those services. For example, a single CACI contract (#14 on the list) allowed them to hire six people to review other contractors’ paperwork, at $104 an hour per worker.

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