Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
National Journal
August 11, 2007
Despite years of attempted fixes, the process for getting a security clearance from Uncle Sam is tedious, slow and antiquated.
By Edward T. Pound
Some problems just won't go away.
Back in 1981, congressional investigators took a long, hard look at the government's program for processing security clearances for Defense Department and military contractor personnel who needed access to classified information. The investigators' bottom line: "Processing delays -- some averaging 220 days -- are costly and could weaken national security." The troubled program, they estimated, could cost taxpayers a tidy $920 million in the next fiscal year.
Fast-forward to a new century in which the United States is battling terrorist networks and seeking to guard against an array of global threats. A six-member federal advisory task force of officials, including Defense Department and industry executives, recently put together a report analyzing how long it takes the government to process clearances for contracting personnel. The bottom line: The program, after all these years, remains deeply flawed. Some defense-contractor employees wait nearly a year to get top-secret clearance.
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office, which is still keeping a critical eye on the clearance program after more than three decades of bad report cards, presented its most recent findings to a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee in May. Derek Stewart, a veteran GAO investigator, got straight to the point. "I will tell you right up front," he said, "that the results of our study are disturbing." Indeed they are, and for the GAO it is pretty much deja vu all over again.
The report laid it out: an inexperienced workforce, bureaucratic bungling and inefficiency, too much paper-pushing, and too little technology. It was all there -- the perfect prescription for a Washington government fiasco.
The GAO noted, as it has so many times before, that clearance delays could damage national security by keeping vital personnel from working on important classified military projects and by increasing costs to taxpayers. The watchdog agency was also troubled, it said, by the poor quality of the background investigations used to grant or deny security clearances. In a sampling of cases, the GAO found that investigators failed to conduct complete inquiries or resolve questionable activities in the backgrounds of applicants for top-secret clearances. Stewart, recently retired, said in an interview with National Journal, "Our report documented that the quality of the investigations isn't worth a damn."
Government reviewers of the clearance program have been sounding that alarm for more than 30 years. The GAO has issued nearly 70 reports on the subject since 1974, and the Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General has issued 14 reports over the past decade. The IG's latest assessment, released last year, was especially damning. Investigators found that some Defense agencies could not rely on the department's personnel computer system for "accurate and complete" data on military and civilian workers who required security clearances. In some instances, the inspector general's office later told Congress, the computer system "contained incomplete or inaccurate data on military and civilian employees, including multiple personnel with the same Social Security number."
As senior security, military, and intelligence officials worry about potential fallout -- spies or terrorists slipping through the clearance screen -- government executives responsible for overseeing the program are struggling to come up with a fix.
Clay Johnson, the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, has assured Congress that officials are heading in the right direction. Testifying before the same Senate Homeland Security subcommittee in May, Johnson said that the government had made "significant progress" in cutting the average time to process clearances. But he also acknowledged, "We are still not granting security clearances as quickly as desired." The Bush administration was developing a plan to radically reform the system, Johnson said: "More automated, more use of commercial databases, more custom investigations."
Separately, Kathy Dillaman, the associate director of the Federal Investigative Services Division at the Office of Personnel Management, which does most of the background investigations for the Pentagon and other government agencies, denied that her agency does sloppy work. She acknowledged that not all of her staff -- 2,200 government agents plus some 7,000 workers from the private sector -- are experienced and "fully trained." But, Dillaman said, "Nothing [is] more important to me than the quality of the work we do.... Quality first." She said that her investigators had "closed a lot" of cases in the past year. "If you are starting the [clearance] process now," she said, "we are getting it done."
Contractors who work on sensitive government projects fume at the long delays. Getting their employees through the clearance process is essential to fulfilling their classified contracts for weapons, intelligence, and technology systems, so it's no wonder they've been pressing Congress and the executive branch in recent years to fix the problems. More than 800,000 industry personnel, working for 12,000 defense contractors, hold security clearances.
Doug Wagoner, speaking on behalf of an industry group called the Security Clearance Reform Coalition, put it this way to National Journal: "We are living in a more dangerous world, and, in responding to the war effort and 9/11, there are a lot of new initiatives and programs, and those programs take more people that have to be cleared. When they are not, the mission is delayed."
August 11, 2007
Despite years of attempted fixes, the process for getting a security clearance from Uncle Sam is tedious, slow and antiquated.
By Edward T. Pound
Some problems just won't go away.
Back in 1981, congressional investigators took a long, hard look at the government's program for processing security clearances for Defense Department and military contractor personnel who needed access to classified information. The investigators' bottom line: "Processing delays -- some averaging 220 days -- are costly and could weaken national security." The troubled program, they estimated, could cost taxpayers a tidy $920 million in the next fiscal year.
Fast-forward to a new century in which the United States is battling terrorist networks and seeking to guard against an array of global threats. A six-member federal advisory task force of officials, including Defense Department and industry executives, recently put together a report analyzing how long it takes the government to process clearances for contracting personnel. The bottom line: The program, after all these years, remains deeply flawed. Some defense-contractor employees wait nearly a year to get top-secret clearance.
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office, which is still keeping a critical eye on the clearance program after more than three decades of bad report cards, presented its most recent findings to a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee in May. Derek Stewart, a veteran GAO investigator, got straight to the point. "I will tell you right up front," he said, "that the results of our study are disturbing." Indeed they are, and for the GAO it is pretty much deja vu all over again.
The report laid it out: an inexperienced workforce, bureaucratic bungling and inefficiency, too much paper-pushing, and too little technology. It was all there -- the perfect prescription for a Washington government fiasco.
The GAO noted, as it has so many times before, that clearance delays could damage national security by keeping vital personnel from working on important classified military projects and by increasing costs to taxpayers. The watchdog agency was also troubled, it said, by the poor quality of the background investigations used to grant or deny security clearances. In a sampling of cases, the GAO found that investigators failed to conduct complete inquiries or resolve questionable activities in the backgrounds of applicants for top-secret clearances. Stewart, recently retired, said in an interview with National Journal, "Our report documented that the quality of the investigations isn't worth a damn."
Government reviewers of the clearance program have been sounding that alarm for more than 30 years. The GAO has issued nearly 70 reports on the subject since 1974, and the Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General has issued 14 reports over the past decade. The IG's latest assessment, released last year, was especially damning. Investigators found that some Defense agencies could not rely on the department's personnel computer system for "accurate and complete" data on military and civilian workers who required security clearances. In some instances, the inspector general's office later told Congress, the computer system "contained incomplete or inaccurate data on military and civilian employees, including multiple personnel with the same Social Security number."
As senior security, military, and intelligence officials worry about potential fallout -- spies or terrorists slipping through the clearance screen -- government executives responsible for overseeing the program are struggling to come up with a fix.
Clay Johnson, the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, has assured Congress that officials are heading in the right direction. Testifying before the same Senate Homeland Security subcommittee in May, Johnson said that the government had made "significant progress" in cutting the average time to process clearances. But he also acknowledged, "We are still not granting security clearances as quickly as desired." The Bush administration was developing a plan to radically reform the system, Johnson said: "More automated, more use of commercial databases, more custom investigations."
Separately, Kathy Dillaman, the associate director of the Federal Investigative Services Division at the Office of Personnel Management, which does most of the background investigations for the Pentagon and other government agencies, denied that her agency does sloppy work. She acknowledged that not all of her staff -- 2,200 government agents plus some 7,000 workers from the private sector -- are experienced and "fully trained." But, Dillaman said, "Nothing [is] more important to me than the quality of the work we do.... Quality first." She said that her investigators had "closed a lot" of cases in the past year. "If you are starting the [clearance] process now," she said, "we are getting it done."
Contractors who work on sensitive government projects fume at the long delays. Getting their employees through the clearance process is essential to fulfilling their classified contracts for weapons, intelligence, and technology systems, so it's no wonder they've been pressing Congress and the executive branch in recent years to fix the problems. More than 800,000 industry personnel, working for 12,000 defense contractors, hold security clearances.
Doug Wagoner, speaking on behalf of an industry group called the Security Clearance Reform Coalition, put it this way to National Journal: "We are living in a more dangerous world, and, in responding to the war effort and 9/11, there are a lot of new initiatives and programs, and those programs take more people that have to be cleared. When they are not, the mission is delayed."