The government’s security clearance process has gone through significant changes in the last year, including moving from the Office of Personnel Management to the Defense Department’s newly renamed Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency and the early stages of implementing the new Trusted Workforce 2.0.
Despite this upheaval, the clearance arena has had some big wins, including paring down the massive background investigations backlog to a sustainable state. The government has whittled the backlog to 201,000 pending determinations—down from a high of 725,000 in 2018—and brought the time for granting initial secret-level clearances to 69 days and top secret to 140 days, a DCSA spokesperson told Nextgov Monday.
That morning, Reps. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., and Don Beyer, D-Va., held a roundtable with a range of federal contractors, most with business focused in the defense and intelligence sectors. The industry executives lauded DCSA for bringing the clearance backlog down to a sustainable state and being far more talkative and transparent with industry about the process.
However, the industry representatives offered some persistent pain points that continue to slow the process and create significant problems for the contracting community.
And these issues affect more than just the vendors’ bottom line.
Gregory Torres, director of personnel security at Booz Allen Hamilton, illustrated the issue at hand by recalling his own feelings about the process during his time in government. Torres previously served in several personnel security roles throughout the Defense Department, most recently as the Pentagon’s director of security for policy and oversight un ..
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