The company's stated core business is to provide consulting, analysis, and engineering services to public and private sector organizations and nonprofits.

[13] In general, the post-World War II era saw a shift in the company's client pool, with many contracts coming from governmental institutions and different branches of the Armed Forces.

[27] Booz Allen Hamilton has faced criticism and coverage for its close ties with leaders of both major American political parties and their donations to them, as well as its longtime alliances with the militaries and surveillance entities of nations abroad.

It planned to later add operations to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, during a time when those countries, as stated by Jill R. Aitoro of the Washington Business Journal, were "recover[ing] from the turmoil associated with the Arab Spring".

[62][63] In 1958, Gordon Pehrson, deputy director of U.S. Navy Special Projects Office, and Bill Pocock of Booz Allen Hamilton developed the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).

[66] In 2013, Booz Allen's Mark Herman, Stephanie Rivera, Steven Mills, and Michael Kim published the Field Guide to Data Science.

[69] In 2006, at the request of the Article 29 Working Party (an advisory group to the European Commission), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) investigated the U.S. government's SWIFT surveillance program, and Booz Allen's role therein.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the contract characterized it as not well-planned and lacking any measure for assuring valuable work to be completed.

As the project progressed, the department became so dependent on Booz Allen that it lost the flexibility for a time to seek out other contractors or hire federal employees who might do the job for less.

[72] On July 11, 2011[73][74] the group Anonymous, as part of its Operation AntiSec,[75] hacked into Booz Allen servers, extracting e-mails and non-salted passwords from the U.S. military.

Anonymous also accused Booz Allen of participating in intelligence-gathering and surveillance programs of the U.S. federal government and, as stated by Kukil Bora of the International Business Times, "possible illegal activities".

[75] Booz Allen confirmed the intrusion on 13 July, but contradicted Anonymous' claims in saying that the attack never got past their own systems, meaning that information from the military should be secure.

[80] In August of that year, during a conference call with analysts, Ralph Shrader, the chairman and CEO, stated that "the cost of remediation and other activities directly associated with the attack" were not expected to have a "material effect on our financial results".

[81] In June 2013, Edward Snowden—at the time a Booz Allen employee[82] contracted to projects of the National Security Agency (NSA)—publicly disclosed details of classified mass surveillance and data collection programs, including PRISM.

Booz Allen condemned Snowden's leak of the existence of PRISM as "shocking" and "a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm".

[91] Furthermore, the influence Booz Allen carries in Washington isn't restricted to donations, but to a large network of lobbyists and political insiders.

Alongside competitors McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen are seen as important factors in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s drive to consolidate power in the Kingdom.

[95] The whistleblower initially alerted colleagues of the overbilling, but says that she was told that the Department of Defense was "too stupid" or "not smart enough" to catch Booz Allen and recover the money.