The clearance system is mission infrastructure. Treat it like one

While Washington is busy reforming government, I’m worried we’re about to repeat one of the oldest mistakes in the national security playbook: treating the security clearance system like a back-office inconvenience instead of mission infrastructure.

You can reorganize offices, trim headcounts, rename initiatives and declare victory from a podium, but if the trusted workforce pipeline is brittle, everything downstream breaks. Contracts slip. Programs stall. Talent walks. And corners get cut in ways that should make every security leader wince.

Recent fake remote IT worker cases highlight just how serious the issue is – when workforce and security become secondary, critical positions become filled with adversaries, not trusted workers. Last year, the Department of Justice described coordinated efforts by North Korea and ones that successfully infiltrated the ranks of the military industrial base.

This isn’t just a “classified comms” problem. Sometimes the issue isn’t someone writing code for a sensitive network, it’s agencies allowing contractors to touch government systems before the proper security determinations are complete. A number of GSA and inspectors general reports have noted ongoing issues of workers supporting national security or sensitive work without the requisite vetting. Those are just the reported cases. With a push for solutions, and not always security, the problem of vetting is too often falling into the margins, not the mission.

Different agencies. Different contexts. Same underlying dynamic: When clearance timelines and requirements don’t align with mission urgency, the system quietly incentivizes risk rather than minimizing it.

I keep coming back to a point Brett Mencin, president of personnel vetting at Xcelerate Solutions, expounded on in a recent op-ed outlining the critical juncture we’re currently seeing in Trusted Workforce reforms: “Implementation still varies widely across agencies. Some have embraced automation and data-driven adjudication. Others remain anchored to legacy workflows, manual reviews and conservative interpretations of risk. The result is a system that is technically modern, but experientially inconsistent.”

We’re not in the “pilot program” era anymore. The policies are here. The architecture is here. The expectations are here. What’s uneven – sometimes painfully so – is execution.

And execution depends on leadership.

Right now, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, arguably the single most important operational engine in the clearance ecosystem, doesn’t have a permanent director at the helm. Justin Overbaugh has been serving as acting director since November, after Director David Cattler stepped down in September.

At the same time, DCSA is in the middle of a genuine overhaul: reorganizing its personnel security mission and, hopefully, aligning to Trusted Workforce 2.0, with more internal realignments anticipated as part of wider government reform efforts. DCSA leadership has also described being “in the midst of a personnel vetting mission transformation” and emphasized the need to align that transformation with NBIS deliveries and TW 2.0 milestones.

Then there’s NBIS itself – the enterprise backbone that’s supposed to modernize investigations and case management. The Government Accountability Office has been blunt: NBIS has faced delays for years, and the Defense Department now projects major development completion by the end of fiscal 2027. GAO has also stressed that sustained leadership is critical to achieving personnel vetting reform.

Another piece of this conversation that rarely gets public attention but quietly determines whether reform sticks or fizzles is the role of the security executive agent within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The SecEA isn’t just a policy author; it is the connective tissue that keeps the personnel security system coherent across agencies, contractors and missions. When the executive agent role is strong, guidance is consistent, reciprocity is real and agencies are less tempted to improvise their own rules under pressure. When it’s weak, fragmented or sidelined, the system drifts – standards diverge, timelines vary wildly and accountability blurs.

I don’t disagree with the need to modernize and optimize the government. I disagree with the idea that clearance reform is somehow optional or “nice to have” or something we can return to after the dust settles, rather than pushing with a similar emphasis and focus as broader reform moves forward.

The clearance process is not a sidebar. It’s the front door to national security work.

If that front door sticks, leaders don’t just lose time, they lose trust:

Trust from cleared professionals who can’t plan their lives around an unpredictable process.
Trust from contractors who can’t staff programs without gambling on start dates.
Trust from agencies that are trying to deliver capability fast but are boxed in by uneven reciprocity and inconsistent implementation.
And public trust, when the system appears arbitrary.

Here’s what security clearance reform needs right now, even amid broader government shakeups:

1. Treat DCSA leadership stability as mission-critical. Acting leadership can keep the lights on. It can’t carry a multiyear transformation at the scale we’re asking for. When a new director takes the helm, that leader should be poised to run, not walk, as they implement the latest reforms.

2. Make “no uncleared work on cleared requirements” a real enforcement priority, not an occasional scandal. False Claims Act cases throughout the past decade should have been a lasting warning. More recent GSA findings should be a forcing function. Instead, too often, they become trivia questions at conferences.

3. Measure what matters to humans, not just dashboards. If average timelines look better but outliers are wrecking hiring, that’s not success – it’s optics. Mencin’s point about modernization being real but inconsistent in practice should be taken as a mandate to standardize execution, not just celebrate policy milestones.

4. Demand an engaged security executive agent. In an era of Trusted Workforce 2.0, continuous vetting and shared services, the security executive agent is what prevents reform from becoming a patchwork of well-intentioned but uneven practices. If government reform efforts overlook or under-resource this function, we shouldn’t be surprised when the same clearance problems resurface over and over again.

Government reform is a worthy project. But if it sidelines the clearance system and treats the trusted workforce like an administrative afterthought, then every other reform effort is building on sand.

We don’t need another tagline. We need sustained leadership, consistent implementation and the courage to admit that national security doesn’t run on organizational charts. It runs on cleared people doing cleared work the right way, every time. It runs on the trusted workforce. And we need to operationalize Trusted Workforce 2.0 reforms if we want to achieve true government efficiency.