Portable security clearances may be on the way

Every year, thousands of employees move from one federal agency to another. But when that move involves the transfer of a security clearance, the system breaks down.
Hiring agencies often do not recognize the security clearances of other agencies. And that causes long delays — and sometimes considerable expense — in getting new employees into their new jobs. Agencies often request new background investigations on employees even though they’ve been cleared in previous investigations.
Now the Bush administration is trying to fix that. The president directed the heads of the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Management and Budget, the intelligence community, and the White House’s national security adviser to come up with a plan by April 30.
OMB requires that agencies accept each other’s security clearances, but that doesn’t happen. Last year, agencies asked OPM to conduct 25,000 new background investigations on people who already had security clearances. OPM denied those.
When hiring a new employee who comes with a clearance from another agency, the hiring agency typically reviews that employee’s background file and other materials to decide what level clearance to give. That process is called adjudication.
And because agencies are readjudicating new employees who already have clearances from other agencies, there’s a big backlog. The problem is especially big at the Defense, Energy and Justice departments, which have accumulated a combined adjudication backlog of more than 80,000 cases.
The problem is particularly bad at the still-fractured Homeland Security Department, said Ben Romero, chairman of the Information Technology Association of America’s intelligence subcommittee.
“They have too many different departments that don’t even recognize their own reciprocity, much less reciprocity from those in industry who are coming in,” Romero said. “Whether we [contractor employees] hold Justice [Department] clearances, or DoD clearances, they still have to vet, yet again, that we are trustworthy enough.”
Kathy Dillaman, associate director for OPM’s Federal Investigative Services Division, says there is some progress in fixing the problem. OPM in 2005 took over Defense’s security clearance investigations, and that has produced more uniformity and willingness among agencies to accept existing clearances.
“What fed into that [lack of trust] was years of different standards, where DoD would do an investigation one way and may or may not include some types of coverage, and OPM would do it another way,” Dillaman said at a hearing last week. “It’s something that’s being fixed with time.”
OPM has taken steps to increase the transparency of the process and build trust among agencies, Dillaman said. For example, its Clearance Verification System database is tied to Defense records and can be accessed by security clearance officials governmentwide. So officials from other agencies can use the database to review what steps were taken by an agency when it gave an employee a security clearance.
Romero of the ITAA said he is seeing signs of improving reciprocity in the intelligence community. The 16 different agencies that make up the community are increasingly accepting one another’s badges and clearances, he said.
A sluggish clearance process has hampered the government for years. Increased staff and improved automation have helped eliminate the backlog of initial security clearance investigations, and shortened the time it takes to do an initial investigation, Dillaman said. Initial investigations now take an average of 67 days to complete, down from 121 days in fiscal 2006, she said.