SAIC Expected to Announce Headquarters Shift From San Diego to Northern Virginia

[Updated 9/18/09 2:45 pm PT. See below.] SAIC, the secretive defense contractor that was founded in San Diego 40 years ago by nuclear physicist J. Robert Beyster, apparently plans to announce the relocation of its corporate headquarters to Tysons Corner, VA, sometime next week.

The looming announcement from Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine was first reported by The Washington Post on its Virginia Politics blog, which cited unnamed “government and business leaders.” The SAIC employee who called it to my attention says “anybody affiliated with corporate [operations] in San Diego is hearing that giant sucking sound.” San Diego’s loss is Virginia’s gain. The Post’s Amy Gardner says the move is expected to bring more than 1,000 “high-paying jobs” to Northern Virginia.

For a company as large as SAIC, relocating the corporate headquarters would likely affect close to 1,000 San Diego employees working in finance, accounting, legal, and other high-level corporate and administrative functions. [Updates with comment from SAIC.] A spokeswoman for SAIC, also known as Science Applications International Corp., responded to my query by email, saying only, “SAIC has not made an announcement about its headquarters.”

The move appears most likely to be announced Monday, when Walt Havenstein takes over as SAIC’s new CEO. Halvenstein, the former head of North American operations for BAE Systems, was named in June to succeed Ken Dahlberg as CEO at the company. Dahlberg, a former General Dynamics executive who succeeded Beyster as CEO in 2003, plans to remain chairman of SAIC’s board of directors.

Dahlberg began shifting many of the company’s high-level functions to Virginia in 2006, when SAIC had about 5,000 employees in San Diego and more than 16,000 at its campus near McLean, VA.

The bulk of SAIC’s workforce has resided in Virginia for decades, because of the company’s focus on providing specialized research and engineering work under contracts for defense and intelligence agencies, as well as energy, health, environment, and other areas. (Because of SAIC’s deep expertise in IT integration and systems support, I think of the company as the systems administrator for the CIA and other intelligence agencies.)

Beyster founded SAIC with a small group of scientists in 1969 to provide contract research services for the government on nuclear weapons and in other fields. The company now has about 45,000 employees in 150 cities worldwide.

SAIC's Virginia Campus
SAIC's Virginia Campus

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.