The stock pitch seemed too good to be true: A century-old company near Washington, D.C., with strong ties to the U.S. intelligence community has secret ways of making money.

The company is Booz Allen Hamilton, and for many years it was a home-run investment. The stock rose 10-fold between the day in 2013 when Edward Snowden went public as the former employee who leaked secret National Security Agency documents and last year’s presidential election.

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Now, Booz Allen is anything but a sure thing. Federal spending on consultants and large outside contractors is dropping fast under the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Booz Allen’s stock is down 40% since Election Day.

The problem for investors: The nature of Booz Allen’s business means it is impossible to gauge how severe the blow from federal cutbacks will be. While Booz Allen gets 98% of its revenue from the U.S. government, a substantial portion of its contracts are classified.

This makes the stock almost uniquely uninvestible, for anybody who wants to know what they own, in today’s environment.

Investors seem to have cottoned on to this problem ahead of Wall Street. Analysts’ average revenue and earnings estimates for 2026 and beyond have barely budged since Election Day, according to data compiled by Visible Alpha.

Maybe this is a belief that Booz Allen can navigate all the cost scrutiny it is under and stay deeply embedded in the government. But, as The Wall Street Journal has reported previously , the company already has offered the government significant potential cost savings .

At least management is transparent about how opaque it is.

“Because we are limited in our ability to provide information about these contracts and services,” the company said in its most recent annual report, “important information concerning our business may not be available, which may limit insight into a substantial portion of our business and reduce the ability to fully evaluate the risks related to that portion of our business.”

U.S. securities rules bar companies from including classified information in their disclosure filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Consequently, Booz Allen couldn’t keep investors fully informed about its business if it wanted to.