US security clearances stuck in limbo

Washington: A broken US security-clearance pipeline is keeping America’s most sensitive jobs waiting — and Congress is now warning that the Pentagon’s flagship fix is years late, billions over budget, and still unable to deliver the modern system Washington promised after a massive data breach a decade ago.
At a hearing of the House Oversight subcommittee on Government Operations, lawmakers from both parties said the Department of Defence’s National Background Investigative Services System, known as NBIS, has become a test of whether the US can protect secrets while hiring fast enough to compete in technology and national security.
“If the topic of today’s discussion sounds familiar, it should,” Chairman Congressman Pete Sessions said, recalling a June 2024 hearing where “Congress raised serious concerns about persistent failures in personnel vetting”.
Sessions said NBIS was meant to be “a one-stop shop for all phases of federal personnel vetting”, but “today, NBIS has deployed only limited capacities and capabilities” and is “more than eight years behind schedule with completion delayed from 2019 to 2028”.
He said delays have “cost the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars” and raised questions about “the safety and reliability of all aspects of the federal personnel vetting system”.
Ranking member Kweisi Mfume said the goal was “straightforward, deliver a background check system that keeps the United States of America safe”, while also ensuring it “gets qualified people to work without delay”.
“America, in my opinion, cannot hope to maintain our technological advantage in the national security space if we make the best engineers, scientists, linguists, analysts, and others spend months. If not years, sometimes in limbo before they can serve,” Mfume said. “And if we can’t clear people, we can’t complete our missions, it’s very, very simple.”
Mfume said the government has spent “about $ 2.4 billion on NBIS and legacy sustainment” since 2017, and the department projects “about another 2.2 billion is needed to finish the job”. “It’s an enormous amount of money for the government to spend on anything and have so very, very little to show for it,” he said.
Justin Overbaugh, acting director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, pushed back on earlier assurances that the agency was on track. “Respectfully, that assessment was too optimistic,” he said.