A 10-page initial report by the Joint Security and Suitability Reform Team lists specific clearance reform activities to be accomplished this year. That list includes these policy, process and technology tasks.
1. Policy: Draft business rules for an all-electronic system for processing clearances.
2. Process: Develop a strategy for improving the accessibility of federal investigative records.
3. Technology: Work on developing a single interface that authorized personnel can use to access information about ongoing clearance investigations and cleared employees.
Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) didn’t mask his disappointment. He said a failure to eliminate delays in issuing security clearances meant the Bush administration would be passing the problem to the next administration. That was not the outcome Voinovich expected when he promised four years ago to work with administration officials to fix the clearance process.
Security clearance reform remains a top national security challenge for which the government’s response has fallen short, Voinovich said at a recent Senate hearing. The government now accepts electronic applications in a process that is still mostly manual, but not all agencies are using the available automation.
“The Defense [Department] bears most of the burden for this failure,” said Voinovich, ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia Subcommittee.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2008, he said, DOD submitted only 77 percent of its clearance applications electronically to the Office of Personnel Management, which conducts clearance investigations for DOD. Voinovich cited an August 2007 DOD report, which states that in July 2007, as many as 5,805 top-secret security clearance investigations of federal contractors had been pending for more than 360 days.
An assessment of the government’s hiring and clearing policies and procedures requested by President Bush in February focused primarily on factors that cause delays and create backlogs in processing security clearances.
A Joint Security and Suitability Reform Team, which conducted the assessment, cited factors such as the absence of a uniform approach to hiring and clearing employees along with significant obstacles to implementing paperless clearance procedures. Members of the team also identified policy barriers to obtaining security clearances for first- and second-generation Americans as an area of special urgency.
The need for people with Middle Eastern language skills is only one aspect of the complex clearance challenges facing the federal government. Background checks for presidential appointees were not addressed in an initial report on a clearance reform proposal presented to the president April 30, but White House officials said that clearance process is also broken.
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