Security clearance

Progress Is Finally Being Made on Security Clearance Backlog

The security clearance backlog has been reduced by 32%, and is now down to just under 500,000 cases, according to National Background Investigations Bureau Director Charles Phalen, speaking before an audience of security professionals at the National Security Institute’s IMPACT seminar.

Over the past year, officials at the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and across the executive branch have been hard at work agreeing to a framework for Trusted Workforce 2.0, the government’s effort to overhaul the security clearance process from the ground up. The first phase in that process has largely focused on reducing the size of the security clearance backlog. With that progress well underway, officials agree it’s now time to begin the kind of overhauls that will also help improve security clearance processing times.

Processing Times

Security clearance processing figures released in the first quarter of 2019 painted a bleak picture—468 days for Top Secret and 234 days for Secret security clearances for Defense Department and industry applicants—and those were the fastest 90% of cases. Security clearance processing times for Defense and industry applicants are at a slight improvement from the highs seen in the second quarter of 2018, when a Top Secret security clearance took a whopping 543 days to process, and a Secret clearance took an average of 325 days to process. But processing times remain higher than they were in the last quarter of 2018.