Fedweek

The Trump administration says it has completed a draft policy on new standards for denying, suspending or revoking security clearances for federal employees, clearances that in many cases are a prerequisite to holding the job.

The latest update on implementation of the President’s Management Agenda said that while the goal of issuing such a policy by now has been missed, the policy has been circulated for comment within agencies including DoD, OPM, OMB and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and is now undergoing legal review. It provided no new target date for issuing the policy, however.

That was one of a number of changes either already under way or anticipated regarding security clearances in the update. Also pending is a “recommendation for the expansion of continuous vetting across the entire federal workforce to regularly review their backgrounds to determine whether they continue to meet applicable requirements.”

It says that the background investigations backlog has been decreased from 725,000 to 657,000 since a June policy decision making “thoughtful, risk-based modifications” to that process, and that reductions “are expected to continue as policy changes are further implemented.” The average time for processing the fastest 90 percent of security clearance cases dropped since then from 400 to 390 days for initial top secret clearances and from 200 to 169 days for initial secret clearances, although both remain well above their targets, as do periodic reinvestigations, which have increased slightly to 316 days on average.

Read more on Security Clearances for Federal Jobs at ask.FEDweek.com

The update also says that “significant progress” has been made in planning toward the planned move of background investigations from OPM to DoD, which it projects will be finished in three years.