Davis: Delays In Clearing Workers Could Harm Homeland SecurityDavis: Delays In Clearing Workers Could Harm Homeland Security

The backlog of government workers requiring security clearance before they can do their jobs could be a threat to national and homeland security. That was the sentiment of a letter House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R.-Va, sent to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this week.

David noted in his letter that the average amount of time for a government contractor, IT or otherwise, to get a security clearance is more than a year. "These delays and backlogs make our country less secure by depriving industry and the government of the personnel necessary to develop security sensitive technology and otherwise carry out the government's national security mission," Davis wrote.

Although security-clearance backlogs are hardly a new problem in government, the problem has been exacerbated by a post-Sept. 11 focus on homeland security. In his letter, Davis proposed three solutions.

The first is an "immediate deployment of personnel and working capital to meet the growing investigative and adjudicative needs of the Defense Security Service," he wrote. A second proposal is to guarantee reciprocity of valid security clearances for workers who move from assignment to assignment for different government agencies. Davis' third proposal is for the Defense Department to work with the Office of Personnel Management and private-sector companies to bring IT to bear on the problem, although he didn't provide specific examples in his letter.

One proposed initiative is the Office of Personnel Management's e-Clearance technology. OPM, which functions as the federal government's HR agency, this month issued a news release stating that it had opened a training laboratory to provide personnel security officers training and experience on two components of e-Clearance: the Clearance Verification System and electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (eQIP). The Clearance Verification System is designed to monitor and provide access to existing security clearance information, while eQIP is a tool for collecting data from applications requesting security clearance.

The ability to staff security-cleared IT workers is equally challenging for both small and large contractors, says Bob Merkl, president of Secure IT Services, a division of Comsys Services LLC. Employees with security clearances command higher salaries--as much as 25% more in some cases--than their non-cleared colleagues. This makes it difficult for government agencies and private-sector sector contractors to keep them on staff. "The higher up in classification these workers are, the harder they are to find," Merkl says.

Orizon Inc., a provider of database consulting and software deployment services that has done work for the FBI, the Treasury Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, knows first-hand the challenge of finding security-cleared IT workers. "Since we're not a large company, time is of most value," says Michael McLean, Orizon's founder and VP. "We have opportunities that come up quickly and have to get security cleared people quickly."

Three years ago, Orizon was given an opportunity to participate in the FBI's Trilogy modernization project as a subcontractor to DynCorp, which was since bought by Computer Sciences Corp. DynCorp was looking for a subcontractor to deploy Windows 2000 desktops to field offices. But the company was skeptical about subcontracting Orizon. DynCorp wasn't confident that Orizon could staff up quickly enough with workers who had the right level of security clearance.

Orizon turned to Comsys to get the 40 staffers it needed to win a portion of the overall Trilogy contract. "We were able to convince the government that, since it was a short-term, one-year project, we could bring in contractors from Secure IT," McLean says.

Merkl agrees with Rep. Davis' proposed solutions for reducing the security clearance backlog, but he adds that the government should also more carefully assess which jobs actually require security clearance. Security clearance requirements have become the default today, he says, even in relatively low-profile projects.