The federal government has doubled down over the past year on streamlining and speeding up the background investigation process for security clearances, making a significant dent in the investigation backlog that held up federal employee and contractor hiring.

But according to federal contractors that spoke at a Feb. 24 congressional roundtable, problems with adjudication of those investigations continue to hold up the process, putting strain on numerous federal contracts.

The Trump administration placed high expectations on the October 2019 transition of the National Background Investigation Bureau from the Office of Personnel Management to the Department of Defense, with promises that the change would work to whittle down the case backlog that was at 300,000 cases at the time of the transition.

But the investigations conducted under the new Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency do not make a final determination of a potential employee or contractor’s suitability for work at a particular agency. Instead, each agency has adjudicators that review the information collected by DCSA, and those adjudicators issue the final stamp of approval.

And while timelines for the clearance investigations have been closely monitored, the adjudication timeline largely goes unreported.

“The entities that decide whether a security clearance should be issued are rightfully separate from those that conduct the background investigation. But those adjudicating security clearances must also be held accountable for balancing timelines against thorough analysis,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va.

“This council lacks data about the raise in adjudications across the entire government.”

According to Greg Torres, principal of personnel security at Booz Allen Hamilton, adjudication times across the government are all over the map, with some agencies processing clearances in a matter of days, while others can take weeks or months to make a determination.

David Berteau, president and CEO of the Professional Services Council, said that security clearance processing times are often only reported as the time it takes from the submission of an application to when the investigators close the case and pass it on to the agency.

“They’re defining the picture so narrowly that you don’t get the full impact of that,” he said.

The matter is complicated further when accounting for reinvestigations, which check up on the status of an already cleared person to make sure that no red flags have arisen in the intervening time.

Some adjudicators don’t make determinations on the reinvestigation results, as the person already has the approval to work at the security level they currently occupy. This can cause problems when contractors want to move their employees from one agency to another, and the new agency sees that the employee has not been approved in their reinvestigation, causing delays while the agencies sort out that approval.

Other agencies put off doing reinvestigations at all in order to cut down on the number of cases currently waiting in the backlog.

As with the rest of the security clearance process, some of the problems with processing adjudications come down to an issue of workforce.

Kevin Manuel-Scott, chairman and CEO of RONIN IT Service, said that the CIA, for example, only has a couple of adjudicators.

Those employees have also been the victims of staffing reductions at agencies looking to reduce overhead cost, as Berteau noted that the Department of Defense moved to cut its adjudication workforce by 25 percent, due to overall headquarters cuts, at the very same time that its progress on the backlog was moving into adjudication.

A lack of reciprocity across agencies also contributes to the adjudicators workload, as contract employees that move from one agency to another often have to go through adjudication and even additional investigations before they can begin work at the new agency.

The adjudicators, meanwhile, don’t have the access to simply log on to the other agency’s system and look at the investigation results, and must instead ask the other agency to package and send over the results in a process that can take weeks.

Agencies will, however, have to report more comprehensive data on the adjudication process, as a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 requires agencies to submit their adjudication times to Congress — in addition to the number of cases the agency receives, the type of investigations and a mitigation plan for their backlog — by mid-April of this year.

Congress, meanwhile, has the opportunity to set aside specific funding for adjudicator positions at in-need agencies during the FY2021 budget drafting process.

About Jessie Bur

Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.

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