NDM Article - New Rules for Clearances Included in Intel Reform

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FEATURE ARTICLE

February 2005

New Rules for Clearances Included in Intel Reform

by Peter M. Steffes

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004—which President Bush now is preparing to implement—mandates a comprehensive shake-up of the nation’s intelligence community.

The law is reflects many of the recommendations of the independent “9/11 Commission,” which proposed a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. intelligence structure. One of the major changes was the creation of a national director to oversee intelligence agencies across the federal government, to propose and oversee a unified budget and to serve as the principle intelligence adviser to the president. In addition, this law:

Establishes a national counterterrorism center to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism intelligence.
Calls for the creation of one or more national intelligence centers to focus on regional security concerns.
Requires a strategy to protect the U.S. transportation system to be developed by April 1 of this year.
Recommends that homeland security grants be distributed to cities and states based on the threat of terrorism, rather than by population size.
Stipulates a significant overhaul of the responsibilities and procedures for issuing security clearances for all government employees and contractor personnel.

New policies and procedures for granting and re-investigating security clearances have been long in coming and are critically needed. Although new procedures were not included in the 9/11 Commission report, Congress, well aware of the current shortfalls in the security clearance program, believed this was the appropriate vehicle to include major revisions to this program.

As reported in the December issue of National Defense, current security clearance investigations are not only slow—in some cases up to 18 months—but the entire clearance program lacks standardization and reciprocity among defense and intelligence agencies. The new law, as soon as fully implemented, will improve the process significantly.

Not later than 90 days after enactment (or March 22), the president is required to select a single department, agency or element of the executive branch to:

Direct the day-to-day oversight of investigations and decision-making for personnel security clearances.
Develop and implement uniform and consistent policies and procedures to ensure effective, efficient and timely completion of security-clearance requests.
Ensure reciprocal access to classified information among all U.S. agencies.
Ensure, as far as possible, that sufficient resources are available in each agency to achieve clearance and investigative program goals.

Within 180 days of enactment (in other words, by June 20), the president must select a single agency of the executive branch to conduct security clearance investigations for the entire federal government.

Within 12 months of enactment, the director of the Office of Personnel Management is required to establish and maintain an integrated, secure database, which can receive information concerning the granting, denial or revocation of a security clearance from all authorized investigative agencies.

The organization selected by the president to coordinate this process is to develop a plan that, within two years of the law’s signing, makes determinations on at least 80 percent of all applications for personnel security clearances within an average of 120 days after the receipt of a completed application, and within 5 years, makes a determination on at least 90 percent of all applications within an average of 60 days.

Once implemented, all of these new procedures will make significant improvements in a broken and dysfunctional security clearance program. For the U.S. defense industry to be effective and cost efficient, timely access to required security clearances are an imperative. The timelines set out in the legislation appear to be reasonable. It will be up to the administration to embrace and fund these needed reforms, and to execute this new program quickly and effectively.