I’d rather have the Defense Dept. responsible for our safety than the Politically Motivated FBI! Most Military personnel are loyal to the country they serve. It’s not all about money. After all, the FBI has shown that giant transgressions against the rules involving millions if not billions in the case of Clinton are only little mistakes and misdemeanors. No mention of TREASON! They need to lose their power to destroy our safety as well as our liberty. Their NAZI tactics need to be STOPPED!
Up until the mid 1990s...you could have your five-year clearance done in roughly a hundred days. Never any problems. Then around 1999, I had a clearance review come up and it was around eight months later when they finally reapproved it. The security guys blamed various things, but never seemed willing to correct anything.
So around 2008, that episode set the record (15 months before they reapproved it). They seemed to want to blame things out of their control and I kept asking...why don’t you control them? No answer.
The word is right now it takes about 12 to 13 months to get a secret level (final, not interim) clearance for someone who has never had one before. TS is about 20 months. This is making people with existing clearances extremely valuable. I’ve heard of some companies offering $20k signing bonuses for cleared job candidates. In another case a company threw “a pile of cash” at an engineer who gave notice in order to change his mind. Apparently it worked... So this effort may also be an attempt to help get labor costs under control because they are trending up significantly right now.
The rapid growth of the Washington DC metropolitan area since 9/11 was funded by national security money going to an ever growing number of Beltway bandits whose job it is to take $100s of Billions and turn it into power point, position papers and power lunches.
In 2015, Congress passed and Obama signed the law creating the National Background Investigation Bureau (NBIB). It was to be a dedicated and focused organization to ensure security clearances were done right and done quickly.
It failed.
NBIB suffered from the usual Obama immaturity and infighting. No one ran the place. All the hiring and contracting need to perform background investigations never took place.
In October 2017, the NBIB was, by their own admission, 725,000 clearances behind. It was gaining a 25,000 per month backlog. Military service members were being discharged because they couldn’t get their clearances renewed. Defense contractors are billions of dollars behind in projects.
In March, 2018, the DoD successfully changed the law to get going on clearances.
A Secret clearance is merely a 7-year NACL check; national agency and law enforcement check. Many commercial entities do exactly the same thing every day. It usually takes less than a week to complete. I’ve had 7 and 10 year NACLs done every year for many years. They have never taken more than 2 weeks from paperwork submittal to be completed.
The government is now past 2-years in many cases to complete a NACL. Even in a good year it still took 10 months to get a NACL completed.
The government’s goal has been 10 days for Secret and 75 or less days for Top Secret. 2004 was about the only year since I’ve been getting clearances that they have met that goal.
As Pepsionice said, until the mid-1990s the DoD did their own investigations for ALL security clearances. In a ‘budget move’ during the Clinton years all investigation for security clearances were transferred to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The concept was to have one organization doing security clearances for the entire federal government. in the 2000’s OPM contracted with private firm(s) to do the clearance investigations, and that became a major problem, when about 2 years ago, it was discovered that the company OPM hired was NOT doing the investigations or were haphazard about them. People were issued clearances whose investigations were incomplete or faulty, e.g. the shooter at the Navy Yard.
And then the company’s computer system malfunctioned, wiping out thousands of clearances. One of my new hires was hurt by that failure. He had previously held a secret clearance because he had served 10 years enlisted and commissioned service. Because he had been over 10 years since he was discharged, his previous clearance had expired. the new company gave him a issued him a new secret security clearance; we then decided to have his level increased because of additional duties that required it. It was during that new background investigation that the company’s computers and servers died and we lost all record of both his new investigation and proof of his secret investigation that had been issued by them/OPM 2 years previously.
Please sign the petition to release the unredacted version of the OIG report :
Interesting. Thanks for posting.
PING!!!!
42 of Obama’s admin staff obtain FBI bypass (no background checks)
They had access to classified emails / summary sec meeting notes/briefings etc with NO FBI background check or clearance.
DoD should also take over from CIA, which underlies the problems in the Bureau.