Just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday would say.

And the cold facts of the budget look good for the FBI — again.

Since 2001, the budget of the government’s leading domestic counterterrorism agency has jumped 87 percent, and it will reach $6 billion if Congress approves President Bush’s funding request for fiscal 2007.

Forty percent of the FBI’s investigative personnel are now targeted at sniffing out and tracking down al Qaeda operatives before they hit the United States again, chief FBI spokesman John Miller said at a roundtable discussion with journalists and national security experts Tuesday.

That includes 103 regional, FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which have grown from only 35 in 2001, and 51 FBI offices in American embassies abroad.

As if it were stopping to gather its breath, however, the FBI is not asking for more agents or analysts to join its almost 30,000-strong workforce (about a quarter of whom are badge- and gun-toting special agents) in fiscal 2007.

About 650 analysts were hired in 2004 alone, bringing the total to about a thousand at the end of 2005.

Instead, it wants more money for brick and mortar projects, such as $33.2 million for new facilities — known as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs — to work with and store highly classified documents.

It also wants $6.3 million to start designing a new Center for Intelligence Training at the FBI Academy complex in Quantico, Va., which it aims to open by 2010.

Quantico will be buzzing with construction crews next year if the FBI gets its way. It wants $11.9 million for an “interim stage rescue team space” and $13.8 million to fund the FBI headquarters annex and critical facility information technology initiatives.

Farther south, at the Savannah River National Laboratory, it wants to build a radiological evidence examination facility (REEF), part of a $25.9 million effort to enhance response capabilities in counterterrorism investigations. A new national asset commander’s staff would also be opened at the Savannah base.

And then there are the troubled FBI computer programs, a legend in law enforcement circles.

The bureau wants $100 million in fiscal 2007 for SENTINEL, designed to be “the primary information repository used for analysis and reporting for both investigative and administrative casework.”

Last year the FBI pulled the plug on SENTINEL’s predecessor, the Virtual Case File system, after spending $104 million on it.

The FBI’s Miller, speaking at the Aspen Institute in Washington Tuesday, said the agency’s Internet technology picture is not as bleak as it has been painted.

FBI agents now use an “Investigative Data Warehouse” to share information on cases, he said, “kind of a Google to search across the law and data bases.”

The coming year, he said, “should be a year of great progress” in FBI information technology.

The FBI’s mission has changed dramatically since 2001, he said. It is interested in “not who dunnit but who might do it.”

In other budget sectors, the FBI asked for:

• $15.1 million for “infrastructure enhancements necessary for the FBI to carry out its Intelligence Program mission”;

• $16.0 million to “support initiatives that comprise the Directorate of Intelligence’s core intelligence processes and to ensure the effective operation of the FBI’s growing Intelligence Program, which provides analytical support to priority counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber and criminal investigations”; and

• $6 million to “support important human resource requirements associated with the FBI’s growing Intelligence Program and Intelligence Career Service.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.