Put all government security clearance holders together and you’d have the second-largest city in the United States, according to the latest annual numbers from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As of October, the number of federal employees and contractors allowed coveted access to secret information totaled almost 4.92 million, an increase of about 1 percent over the preceding year. Of that total, about 3.5 million were feds, augmented by almost 1.1 million contract employees, the ODNI report said. There were also about 300,000 cleared individuals who fell in the category of “other,” meaning that records didn’t make…
Browsing: security clearance
The Obama administration took to the Senate yesterday to tout the progress they’ve made — and held — on speeding up background checks and adjudications for security clearances. A lot of people were there — the heads of the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, the Director of National Intelligence, a GAO expert, and a high-ranking Defense official. But one key demographic was noticeably absent: The average federal employee and contractor who has to wait — sometimes for months — for his clearance. That’s where you come in. We’d like to hear from you if…
Federal Times wants to hear from security clearance investigators about your job. Do you have enough resources to conduct your investigations? Are the workloads too heavy? Do you feel pressure to sacrifice quality to clear cases faster? What needs to be done to improve the process? E-mail me at slosey@federaltimes.com if you’d like to talk. If you’d prefer that your name not be published, that would be fine.