The Department of Defense could take over security clearance investigations for all federal agencies, as the U.S. government overhauls the current vetting system to help prevent inside security threats and reduce a huge backlog in clearance investigations.

The current system often leaves people waiting a year or more for final approval. But critics are skeptical that the proposed takeover by DOD, which was first reported by the Associated Press last week, will lead to real change.

“The transfer itself is not going to effect the problems that exist in the industry,” Mark Zaid, a private attorney who often represents clients in security clearance cases, told ThinkProgress. “There has to be fundamental change and a revision of their mindset as to how they undertake these investigations.”

Congress shifted responsibility for security clearance investigations from DOD to the Office of Personnel Management in 2005. At the time, OPM touted the move as a way to reduce costs and maximize efficiency.


“As new critical needs are identified, OPM will be able to redirect resources quickly to meet those challenges,” then-Director Kay Coles James said at the time.

Since then, the background check system has been riddled with problems. A series of embarrassing high-profile leaks by former Army Private Chelsea Manning, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, and others raised concerns within intelligence and defense agencies about so-called “insider threats” and increased pressure to weed out potential leakers.

Those concerns have only grown since. On Saturday, the FBI arrested a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer en route to China, where he allegedly planned to sell national security secrets.

At the same time, OPM has a backlog of around 700,000 people waiting for a security clearance, many of them for up to a year or more. Speaking at a panel last year, National Background Investigations Bureau director Charles Phalen traced the backlog to 2014, when OPM terminated its contracted with the defense contractor US Investigation Services, or USIS, after a cyber attack on the company exposed thousands of government employees’ personal data.

With the USIS contract gone, OPM lost 60 percent of its investigative capacity, Phalen said — capacity the agency is still working to recover.


In March, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) sent a letter to the White House asking the Trump administration to prioritize reforming the security clearance system.

“These inefficiencies cost the taxpayer millions of dollars, sap morale and productivity, and harm our nation’s security,” Warner wrote.

Despite some improvements at OPM, DOD pushed Congress to hand back control of its own security clearances. Lawmakers agreed, and the 2017 and 2018 National Defense Authorization Acts directed the Pentagon to take back clearance investigations for DOD personnel and contractors.

That shift is set to take place over the next three years, according to the AP. DOD will first take on re-evaluations of existing clearances, which happen every five or 10 years, before taking on initial investigations for new hires.

But DOD could take over security clearances for the rest of the federal government, as well, an unnamed official told the AP. It’s not clear whether DOD would split that responsibility with OPM or whether it would be the sole investigator. OPM will continue to investigate the cases in its current backlog.

Officials at DOD have touted new technology, automation, and a so-called “continuous evaluation” program as ways to fix the broken security check system and save money in the long term.


“Under the current system you’ve still got investigators out in the field tracking down neighbors and relatives,” Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told ThinkProgress. “They’re doing all kinds of grunt-level investigation that could be vastly simplified through automated means.”

It remains to be seen whether the new program will be more successful than the shift from the Defense Department to OPM in 2005, which also promised cost savings and efficiency.

DOD’s continuous evaluation program is already monitoring some 1.1 million employees, according to the AP. It’s meant to pick up red flags like arrests or financial problems that would normally only come up when an employee’s clearance is reevaluated every five or 10 years. So far, the AP reports that the program has led DOD to revoke 58 security clearances.

“If someone has an emergent problem, (DOD) will not have to wait five years for their next clearance review to be flagged in real time,” Aftergood said. “That is both plausible and smart.”

Still, some critics say even the small continuous evaluation pilot program has errors and delays that bode ill for the much larger security clearance investigation program DOD is spinning up.

Kel McClanahan, a private attorney who handles security clearance cases, gave the example of a DOD employee whom the continuous evaluation program allegedly flagged in a case of mistaken identity. It took nine months and a call to a senior DOD lawyer to close the investigation, McClanahan said.

“Bottom line, the Continuous Evaluation office has at least a nine-month backlog with its current workload to complete an investigation into a typo,” McClanahan told ThinkProgress in an email.

“What do you think is going to happen when that workload increases by 1,000% to include all new investigations as well?”

Indeed, many of the same backlog problems that have plagued OPM also exist in the agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community, like the NSA and the CIA, which do their own security clearance investigations.

It’s also unclear whether the new systems, which focus on flagging individuals in financial jeopardy or who have legal troubles, will be able to detect government workers who are likely to leak sensitive information to the media or pass along state secrets to a foreign government.

“The idea is not just to run everyone through a wringer and give them a stamp of approval,” said Aftergood, the government secrecy expert.

“The real objective is to find the bad apples and exclude them. There’s obviously lots of room for improvement in that area.”