Slowed Security Clearances

Agencies may not meet goal of speeding security clearances

Government contractors and potential federal employees anticipating that the wait for security clearances will get shorter in December may be disappointed, industry officials are cautioning.
The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act requires federal agencies to cut the wait for clearances to a maximum of 120 days for at least 80 percent of applications by the end of 2006. The deadline is a warm-up for 2009 deadlines that will require security clearances to be processed in 60 days and all Top Secret clearance requests to be completed in 120 days. But Trey Hodgkins, director of defense and intelligence issues for the Information Technology Association of America, said he doubts agencies will be up to the task.

"They are not even close to where they should be," he said. "They aren't anywhere in the ballpark."

Multiple intelligence sources said that when requests for a Top Secret clearance or for access to Sensitive Compartmentalized Information are handled through the Office of Personnel Management, they can take up to 18 months to process. An OPM spokesman, however, challenged that estimate, saying the agency's average time for an initial clearance investigation was closer to 150 days, or five months. "In fact, for Top Secret clearances with priority handling, the average processing time is only 53 days, [and] for all other clearance levels with priority handling, it's 64 days," said OPM spokesman Peter Graves.

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