Green Badgers vs. Blue Badgers

RJ Hillhouse, who writes a blog called The Spy Who Billed Me, had a piece in the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post on outsourcing at the CIA. The agency's National Clandestine Service is still managed by government employees (known as "blue badgers"), she writes, but more than 50 percent of the operation is made up of contractors ("green badgers").

So just how many contract employees are working in the entire intelligence community? Shane Harris hazarded a guess in the June 15 issue of Government Executive: 40,000. There are about 100,000 intelligence professionals in government employment at civilian and military agencies.