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has 99 cleared individuals on staff and nine jobs posted for individuals requir- ing a clearance. Another small business, iWorks, has 82 cleared individuals and eight more awaiting clearance, along with 14 open job postings that require clearances.
Those job vacancies, stalled back- ground checks and delayed reciproc- ity applications mean revenue loss for the companies. More importantly, however, they mean that the federal government cannot effectively execute national security missions.
In 2018, ManTech, a consulting and digital solutions contractor, testified that approximately 10,000 contract positions critical to the intelligence community remained unfilled, rep- resenting $1.8 billion in lost contract support for critical missions. This was out of a $71 billion annual intelligence budget.
According to the National Security Alliance, a trade association of con- tract security companies, security clearance processing delays in 2019 — caused predominantly by some agencies’ unwillingness to engage in reciprocity — may account for as much as $2 billion in lost productivity in the intelligence community and up to $8 billion for the federal government as a whole.
Strategies for closing the gap
Despite the lack of availability of cleared individuals, the background investigation and adjudication pro- cesses have been improving in effi- ciency over time. In fiscal 2018, for example, the federal government approved 668,546 security clearances, and in fiscal 2019, it approved 964,138 clearances — a 44.2% increase in a single year.
And the increase was in both secret and top-secret investigations.
Yet there is more work to do. Although the speed of the clearance process is increasing, cleared workforce demands are exploding. Private-sector companies have thousands of jobs they need to fill and not enough individuals to fill them.
Since mid-2018, the Government Accountability Office has placed secu- rity clearance investigations on its High- Risk List of government programs in dire need of improvement and reform. Security clearances landed on the list for myriad reasons, including concerns about the timeliness of investigation completion.
Congress can play a vital role in improving those processes and ensuring that the executive branch is recruiting diverse talent as a pipeline into the national security community.
r companies have
thousands of jobs they need to fill and not enough individuals to fill them.
For example, the Securely Expediting Clearances Through Reporting Trans- parency Act, which I wrote with for- mer Rep. Steve Knight (R-Calif.), and my fiscal 2020 National Defense Autho- rization Act amendment would reduce clearance adjudication backlogs by tracking the background investiga- tion and adjudication processes so that agencies and Congress could pinpoint where problems persist and focus on solutions.
Additional congressional oversight has been effective in spurring improve- ments that reduced the backlog of background investigations. We must work across the enterprise of govern- ment — and across the branches of gov- ernment — to leverage successes and make continued improvements to the security clearance process. Most impor- tantly, however, we must have difficult conversations about what should and should not exclude individuals from fed- eral service in the national security space and ensure that we take into account changes in legal, cultural and technologi- cal norms.
These efforts are critical to our nation- al security. ■
Gerald E. Connolly represents Vir- ginia’s 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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