GAO Identifies Ways to Shorten Clearance Process

In a fresh report to the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommends additional steps to consider that may short wait-times for initial and renewed security clearances. Among its recommendations: first determining whether a clearance is necessary for one to do his/her job and, if so, what level of clearance is sufficient. The report notes that Top Secret clearances require ten times as much time and money to process as Confidential- or Secret-level clearances.

The GAO’s Jack Edwards says:

Efforts to reform personnel security clearance processes should consider, among other things…whether clearances are required for positions…. Requesting a clearance for a position in which it will not be needed, or in which a lower-level clearance would be sufficient, will increase both costs and investigative workload unnecessarily.

Federal Times reported on the new GAO assessment here.

As of December 19, the GAO report was not yet available on GAO’s website, but was accessible here, the website of the Federation of American Scientists.

Filed Under: Reform, Procedures