Three Tracks for One Clearance
In September 2014 the Government Accountability Office examined how the federal government takes security clearances away, and found that the answer depends on who is asking. Two executive orders, one from 1960 and one from 1995, created parallel procedures, one for contractors and one for employees. Contractors get a personal appearance before an administrative judge before the decision is made. Military and civilian employees at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense could submit paper first and appear in person only on appeal, after the decision had already been issued.
The differences ran downhill from there. Some DHS components let employees question witnesses and others did not, because the department’s instruction was vague on the point. The Coast Guard was sending military personnel letters telling them they could not bring an attorney, contrary to the governing order, until GAO pointed it out. At Defense, a 2011 directive from the Secretary to merge the military departments’ separate appeal boards had not been carried out three years later, stalled by a dispute over whether it was even legal.
The paper trail for employees was also thinner than the one contractors received. A Defense administrative judge who hears a military or civilian employee’s appeal issues a recommendation rather than a decision, and GAO found that the recommendation generally is not shared with the employee. The Army and Air Force appeal boards sent final decisions in short memorandums saying the record had been reviewed and the revocation sustained or reversed, while contractors received detailed findings of fact and analysis. Army and Navy rules, GAO found, could let the boards gather new information, including credit reports pulled directly from the bureaus, without telling the employee or offering a chance to respond. Officials at the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals, which runs the contractor hearings, told GAO that the employee process offered less transparency, quality and accountability than their own.
And nobody could say how many people were in the machine. Defense revoked eligibility for 16,146 military and civilian employees and another 2,499 contractors in fiscal years 2009 through 2013, according to GAO’s report. DHS revoked 113 in fiscal 2013 alone. Neither department tracked how many people were handed a proposal to revoke, so GAO called the total affected population unknown. In one Defense system, fewer than 3,000 people had a recorded statement of reasons against more than 16,000 revocations. Someone forgot to fill in the field.
A Process Nobody Had Complained About
GAO made recommendations to DHS, Defense and the Director of National Intelligence, who serves as the government’s Security Executive Agent and is therefore responsible for uniform clearance policy. The two that landed on ODNI are still open. Recommendation 9 asked for performance measures and the collection of revocation and appeals data. Recommendation 13 asked for something smaller still, a review of whether the existing process is the most efficient and effective approach, including whether one process should cover everyone. The recommendation’s own text names the two sore spots, the timing of the personal appearance and the ability to cross-examine witnesses. GAO did not ask ODNI to change anything. It asked ODNI to look.
ODNI’s 2014 answers make instructive reading now. Its officials told GAO that standardization made sense from an efficiency standpoint, and that guidance on appeals might be worth pursuing, but that it would have to compete with other priorities and limited resources. They also said they had not heard fairness complaints in their own reviews, only anecdotal worry that the process ran slow. ODNI generally agreed with GAO’s recommendations, and GAO’s annual open-recommendation letters have recorded a concurrence on both ever since, in 2023, in 2025 and in this year’s letter. A concurrence is an agreement to look. It is not the looking.
Sixteen Left, Two Stayed
The fairest objection is that ODNI is slow at everything. The 2023 letter suggests otherwise. That year’s list of open unclassified recommendations carried 18 from reports older than 2022, covering continuous evaluation, clearance timeliness, an academic partnership program, workforce diversity planning and personnel vetting measures. Sixteen are gone from this year’s list. GAO’s tally of recommendations closed without implementation moved only from five to six over the same stretch, so most of those departures look like real closures. ODNI, in other words, can finish old work.
What remains from before 2022 are the two revocation recommendations, now in their twelfth year and the oldest on the unclassified list. The letter does not say why. One possible explanation, and it is only that, is the label. GAO reserves its priority designation for items that warrant the Director’s personal attention, and this year’s unclassified list attaches it to other clearance work. A review of whether revocation is fair to the person being revoked does not carry one.
The Badge Decides the Process
It matters because the numbers behind it are careers. GAO’s 2014 tables show Army military revocations, a count that includes reserve and National Guard members, climbing from 354 in fiscal 2009 to 3,092 in fiscal 2012, and Army personnel accounted for 9,303 of Defense’s 16,146 revocations over the five years. What follows a revocation varies just as widely. In the Navy, where every position has required secret clearance eligibility since 2011, a sailor who loses the clearance generally loses the career. At the Secret Service and DHS headquarters, where nearly every job requires a clearance, termination follows. Elsewhere it comes down to a supervisor’s discretion and whether anyone can find a job that does not need one.
The process itself has not obviously converged. Practitioner guides published this year still describe separate appeal bodies by agency, including a Personnel Security Appeals Board for Defense personnel and an Access Review Committee at the Justice Department. GAO warned in 2014 that continuous evaluation could raise the number of revocation proposals, which means the question of whether the process is consistent and fair was always going to grow rather than shrink. GAO’s letter also still lists the recommendation for collecting revocation and appeals data as open.
The next letter is due next September, when the recommendation will be thirteen years old. Somebody could review it before then. A review requires neither money nor a statute, only a desk and a deadline.
