As you might imagine, working on a classified program means you're working for the government, so your company's profitability is inherently a function of the lowest bid mechanism for contracting - to an extent, as we proved they can't just costlessly switch to the cheapest bid unless they want a system that doesn't actually work. It's maybe counterintuitive, as the federal government is the only employer that literally does have the ability to print money, but in practice, even though they often face and solve problems far more complex than any faced by industry, it is often not a money-making endeavor.

Specifically, the point of geointelligence is we're trying to gain a long-term strategic advantage over all other enemy and competitor countries. To the extent we succeed at doing this, the government itself doesn't earn a profit from it. Everyone else does. We try to tax them in order to pay ourselves, but people don't like taxes and they frankly don't understand the ways in which spycraft is benefiting them because all that ever gets publicized are our failures. When what we do works, you never hear about it.