Reforms begin to ease security clearance backlog

Officials from two key government agencies told a Senate panel Wednesday that they will reduce the processing time for most security clearances to 90 days by the end of 2006, in accordance with a law passed last year.

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, called Clay Johnson, the Office of Management and Budget's deputy director for management, and Linda Springer, director of the Office of Personnel Management, to testify on progress at addressing a backlog of security clearance applications which, according to the most recent OPM count, is around 116,000. The average processing time for applications is roughly 274 days.

Johnson and Springer assured Voinovich's Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management that those numbers will soon drop.

They laid out a plan for improving the security clearance process, which includes establishing a consolidated database of personnel information to be shared by all agencies, hiring more investigators and formulating more accurate workload projections.

OPM took over some of the Defense Department's security clearance work in February and now handles 90 percent of federal employee and contractor investigations. After the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 -- which required the 90-day limit -- was passed, OMB was given responsibility to oversee progress on the reducing the clearance backlog.

Springer and Johnson told the subcommittee that the reforms are working.

"This has been broken for a very long time and our group is going to be the one to fix it," Johnson said. He heads the new Security Clearance Oversight Steering Committee, which has delegates from OPM and all the major agencies that use security clearances.

Springer said that since February, OPM has reduced the number of Top Secret clearance investigations in progress from about 72,000 to 54,000. The agency hired 400 additional employees and contractors to conduct investigations, bringing the total to 8,400-a level sufficient to achieve timeliness goals set out in the intelligence act, she said.

A representative from the Government Accountability Office, which placed the Defense Department's security clearance backlog on its list of high-risk management challenges in January, testified that OPM and OMB's progress is promising, but has not quelled every concern.

"DoD's investigative function, when transferred to OPM in February, was not a panacea," said Derek Stewart, GAO's director of defense capabilities and management.

Stewart said he is primarily concerned with the quality of the investigations, and emphasized the importance of reviewing a sampling of investigations for quality control. Strong metrics for evaluation are needed, he said.

While both Stewart and Voinovich praised OMB's leadership role, Johnson said oversight responsibility may be transferred to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence next summer, because of that agency's direct involvement in the issue.

"I'd feel a whole lot more comfortable if you'd stay with it," Voinovich responded.