The editors of the Washington Post have found something about the Trump Administration that they like—its plan to move responsibility for processing security clearances through the Department of Defense rather than the Office of Personnel Management:
BURIED IN the Trump administration’s 132-page plan to overhaul the federal government is a significant policy shift that has received little attention: a proposal to transfer responsibility for background investigations for security clearances from the Office of Personnel Management to the Defense Department. As many federal employees and contractors know firsthand, this change is a long time coming.
The OPM has long been criticized for its slow processing of background checks, but complaints about its inefficiency have multiplied in the past few years. It currently takes up to 12 to 18 months to process interim clearances, and the agency has a backlog of approximately 725,000 investigations — a figure that it says could take years to bring down. As The Post reported last August, the backlog has made it difficult for contractors to fill sensitive positions and has potentially cost billions in salaries for employees who were unable to work while waiting on clearances. In January, the Government Accountability Office added the process to its “High Risk List†of programs that are urgently in need of reform to “prevent waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.â€
Does that make them collaborators?
Even if the reform were to make it through the Congress, I suspect that any such move will be faced with lawsuits as a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. I’d also be curious to know why it takes OMB 18 months to process interim clearances. Is it just the very large number or are there specific bottlenecks? Or are they just slow?
I hasten to point out that the editors only note one side of the equation:
the backlog has made it difficult for contractors to fill sensitive positions and has potentially cost billions in salaries for employees who were unable to work while waiting on clearances
The other side is that the time involved in processing the applications also costs money.
Andy will know this stuff better than I, but I had to laugh at the suggestion that any DoD personnel effort would be especially efficient, but maybe things have changed. Maybe OPM is extra bad, but I would be surprised if their systems were any less out of date than those at DoD. I would suspect that this is at least partially/mostly due to security requirements made by Congress w/o adequate funding to process all of the requirements. OTOH, DoD has much less trouble getting funding, so maybe this would work.
Steve
The bit about interim clearances is almost certainly wrong. That can apply in exceptional cases (Jared Kushner), but it is not the norm. In my experience in processing clearances, the biggest roadblock to a timely interim was the subject not completing the required paperwork in a timely manner, or not completing it fully. Once submitted, a decision on an interim was always less than 30 days. But that was for the DoD, each agency has a different adjudication function.
And just to note, there are two steps to getting a clearance – the investigation and adjudication. Investigations were centralized under OPM, but adjudications remained with the various agencies.
There’s a lot of background to this move – it basically started when DoD sought to take back the process from OPM because of all the problems OPM was having. DoD advocated Congress and Congress agreed and put in a directive to do just that as part of the FY2018 Defense appropriation. With the DoD soon to be in control of their own investigations, parts of the Trump administration thought, “why not give it all to DoD?” So the administration may do that through some kind of EO, or they may already have done it.
So that’s where we are. Supposedly the DoD has some new automated tools that are supposed to streamline stuff and the DoD was actually the agency responsible for providing the IT support to OPM’s clearance investigation function. But I don’t know much about that.
Overall, I’m skeptical things will improve. After all, DoD has been in charge of investigations before, back when each agency did their own and it didn’t go so well. That failure was why the Obama administration centralized at OPM in what seemed like a smart move at the time, but it appears they did little else to address the fundamental and structural problems with investigations, to say nothing of the whole process. Like we’ve seen for the last many decades, bureaucrats in Washington strongly favor moving pucks around on an org chart over more holistic reform efforts. This new move doesn’t look to be any different.