"We're both very boring. I mean, uh, who else reads the tax code?" -- Reporter Donald L. Barlett on how his journalistic relationship with colleague James B. Steele has managed to last over 30 years.

With the Federal government's increasing reliance on private corporations for military and intelligence projects, many government contractors have already become household names -- but there is a multi-billion dollar company, one that has received more private government contracts than any other, that you've probably never heard of: Science Applications International Corporation. SAIC, as it is known, has a workforce of 44,000, annual revenues that reached $8 billion in 2006, and a list of current and former board members that reads like a who's who of political and military heavyweights. In a story for Vanity Fair, the venerable investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele pull back the curtain of government contracting to reveal that even though "several of SAIC's biggest projects have turned out to be colossal failures," in the end, the company always manages to get paid.

Read Donald Barlett and James Steele's original reporting in Vanity Fair: Washington's $8 Billion Shadow