Rallying 'Round the Flag

If you spend it, they will come: Since al-Qaeda hit the Pentagon, more people have moved to greater Washington than to any other non-Sunbelt region. Call it denial, call it playing the odds; having weighed the certainty of good jobs versus the threat of future catastrophe, people have voted with their moving vans. The threat is real. Last year, Rand Corp., the granddaddy of national security think tanks, proposed a complex formula for estimating the risk of major terrorist attacks in U.S. cities. The cities with the most dense urban cores, New York and Chicago, ranked first and second because of the prospect of many deaths in a relatively small area. Washington, despite much lower density, was third, because of its obvious strategic importance.

That's enough risk to inspire the bollards and cameras and radiation detectors, but not enough to persuade people to leave. If you want perfect safety, you could buy a government-surplus missile silo in sparsely populated Kansas or Wyoming. They come on the market from time to time. Once you seal the hatch on an Atlas E silo, encased in 18 inches of steel-reinforced concrete beneath at least six feet of prairie sod, you can ride out a nuke more than 50 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. But the silo market is slumping, while two-bedroom condos in Kalorama, within walking distance of prime al-Qaeda targets, are going for $750,000 and up.

Government procurement was rising even before the attacks, because presidents going back to Ronald Reagan have shared a belief that contracting with private companies for services is better than hiring more government employees to do the work. Everything about the United States has grown significantly since the 1980s--the population, the economy, the federal budget--except for the size of the federal workforce. Still, Fuller has a pretty good handle on how much the war on terror has supercharged the spending.

"We've calculated that, without 9/11, procurement spending in the region would have grown $5.5 billion over the last four years," he explains. "But 9/11 happened, and the actual growth was $18.5 billion." The difference between those two numbers -- $13 billion -- is another way of glimpsing the prosperity that has followed after the fireballs. "Each billion in additional procurement spending generates approximately 7,000 new jobs," Fuller adds.

What kinds of jobs? Fuller has still more PowerPoint slides. Washington leads the nation in total job production over the past five years, thanks to the post-9/11 rush, with other thriving cities far, far behind. This region has created some 200,000 new jobs in that period.

And yet, the Washington area actually trails the rest of the country in the growth of most job categories. Even with all the construction cranes and federal office renovations, we're a bit behind the average in construction jobs. We're way behind in retail, in financial services, in education and health-care jobs. Our new jobs are concentrated in just two categories, Fuller says. First, "professional services" -- meaning highly paid technical, scientific, managerial, consulting and computer-design jobs. And the second category, more mysterious: "other services."

"Those are the people who baby-sit, cut lawns, do dry cleaning and clean the homes of the professional services people," Fuller explains.

The war on terror has given Washington an E-Z Pass for the turnpike to the future. These are precisely the sort of jobs that experts believe will hold the key to tomorrow's economy. The region has roughly 2 percent of the total American workforce, but more than 10 percent of the computer systems designers, 8 percent of the consultants and the scientific researchers, 6 percent of the professors and the technologists and the Internet operators. "This is the new economy," Fuller sums up. So we should be very well positioned to prosper indefinitely, provided we don't get incinerated.

MONEY IS HOW GOVERNMENT SAYS, "I CARE." Frowny politicians can hug disaster victims amid scenes of devastation, and that's fine for a day or two. Then people want the bottom line: What's the appropriation? When President Bush went to flooded New Orleans in September to talk about Hurricane Katrina, the key quote was, "I have asked for, and the Congress has provided, more than $60 billion."

The collapse of the twin towers on live television, and the direct hit on the Pentagon, focused governmental concern -- meaning spending -- to an intensity not seen in generations, going back to Pearl Harbor. But something had changed in the intervening decades. After Pearl Harbor, it was easy to see exactly where the money was going. Millions of young men and women joined the government as soldiers, seamen, airmen and clerks. Tanks, airplanes, destroyers and aircraft carriers rolled out of factories and shipyards on round-the-clock shifts. The work never stopped. Bombs, bullets, guns, uniforms, packs, tents, Jeeps, mess kits -- all highly tangible and easily understood. Even the most highly classified supersecret expenditure went searingly public less than four years after Pearl Harbor, when Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb.

Today, the output is more elusive. Where is the money going? You can read about a spending bill. You can visit one of the publications or Web sites devoted to tracking the parade of new, rich, inscrutable-sounding government contracts awarded each day. A sampling from a January issue of Washington Technology magazine:

ManTech International Corp., Fairfax, Va., won a $300 million, two-year subcontract from VSE Corp., Alexandria, Va., to provide the Army with support services in Afghanistan and Iraq . . .