I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be rude, but this is a wildly innacurate claim. Citations are requested on HN posts to avoid misinformation (though apparently nobody adheres to or enforces this rule anymore).
It only costs employers a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to obtain and maintain a US security clearance for employees [1]. It's not really a hurdle when hiring new talent without a clearance. In general, we hire military veterans not because of their clearance, but because of their tendency (not always, but in general) to possess high integrity, strong leadership skills, loyalty, niche skillsets, and strong work ethic.
The actual billing rates for an investigation aren't that bad (and can be found here: https://www.dcsa.mil/mc/pv/gov_hr_security/billing_rate/). I'm not sure where the 50-80,000 comes from, but somewhere around 70k average total cost is what I remember being cited when I was first getting a cleared job years back.
It wasn't the direct charge for the investigation that caused that, though. It was the wait. You can obviously mitigate that by finding something productive for people to do while they await clearance, but a lot of employers struggle quite a bit to do that if all or almost all of the meaningful engineering work they do is classified. When I was still at Raytheon, it was becoming fairly common to see people waiting for over two years sitting around in what they called "ACES" or the awaiting clearance employee station. They tried to find some way to put these people to use, but for older programs with very limited unclassified code bases, there wasn't much to do. We had guys adding unit tests and setting up SonarQube for over a year, to code they had no context for and no understanding of how it was used.
It was quite frustrating, to the point that the President of our business unit testified to Congress about the costs of the investigation backlog, which lasted years in the wake of the OPM hack.
According to your link the cost for a TS is $3000-$15000. That is just the expense directly to OPM (office of personnel management).
The hired employee cannot perform the work they are hired to perform until that clearance is granted which can take as little as 3 months. A TS investigation will generally run from 6-18 months. Mine took closer to 18 months and I am a boring nobody with no foreign connections. Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor also took about 18 months for a clearance.
TS alone does not grant access. It is a classification umbrella allowing access to compartments, the most common being SCI. These also take time, money, and administration.
You can also receive an interim secret pretty fast to start certain work immediately . Once you have TS/SCI it’s as “easy” as some paperwork and a briefing to get read into another space. That initial TS investigation is LONG though as you said
Interim secret clearances are routine, but not so much for TS. Unsurprisingly, it comes down to urgency of need and not anything else like seniority or authority. That explains why certain nobodies in the military can easily attain an interim but not senior officials working on presidential staff.
I was a nobody in the military and had to get one at my first command until the investigation completed! Also - I heard from buddies still in/contracting that they increased the time period between needing to get reinvestigated? I did contracting for a while afterwards and have considered returning. I miss being mission focused rather than profit but the reinvestigation process/finding a sponsor is intimidating.
Comments
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be rude, but this is a wildly innacurate claim. Citations are requested on HN posts to avoid misinformation (though apparently nobody adheres to or enforces this rule anymore).
It only costs employers a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to obtain and maintain a US security clearance for employees [1]. It's not really a hurdle when hiring new talent without a clearance. In general, we hire military veterans not because of their clearance, but because of their tendency (not always, but in general) to possess high integrity, strong leadership skills, loyalty, niche skillsets, and strong work ethic.
1. https://www.taonline.com/security-clearances/hiring-cleared-...
The actual billing rates for an investigation aren't that bad (and can be found here: https://www.dcsa.mil/mc/pv/gov_hr_security/billing_rate/). I'm not sure where the 50-80,000 comes from, but somewhere around 70k average total cost is what I remember being cited when I was first getting a cleared job years back.
It wasn't the direct charge for the investigation that caused that, though. It was the wait. You can obviously mitigate that by finding something productive for people to do while they await clearance, but a lot of employers struggle quite a bit to do that if all or almost all of the meaningful engineering work they do is classified. When I was still at Raytheon, it was becoming fairly common to see people waiting for over two years sitting around in what they called "ACES" or the awaiting clearance employee station. They tried to find some way to put these people to use, but for older programs with very limited unclassified code bases, there wasn't much to do. We had guys adding unit tests and setting up SonarQube for over a year, to code they had no context for and no understanding of how it was used.
It was quite frustrating, to the point that the President of our business unit testified to Congress about the costs of the investigation backlog, which lasted years in the wake of the OPM hack.
According to your link the cost for a TS is $3000-$15000. That is just the expense directly to OPM (office of personnel management).
The hired employee cannot perform the work they are hired to perform until that clearance is granted which can take as little as 3 months. A TS investigation will generally run from 6-18 months. Mine took closer to 18 months and I am a boring nobody with no foreign connections. Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor also took about 18 months for a clearance.
TS alone does not grant access. It is a classification umbrella allowing access to compartments, the most common being SCI. These also take time, money, and administration.
You can also receive an interim secret pretty fast to start certain work immediately . Once you have TS/SCI it’s as “easy” as some paperwork and a briefing to get read into another space. That initial TS investigation is LONG though as you said
Interim secret clearances are routine, but not so much for TS. Unsurprisingly, it comes down to urgency of need and not anything else like seniority or authority. That explains why certain nobodies in the military can easily attain an interim but not senior officials working on presidential staff.
I was a nobody in the military and had to get one at my first command until the investigation completed! Also - I heard from buddies still in/contracting that they increased the time period between needing to get reinvestigated? I did contracting for a while afterwards and have considered returning. I miss being mission focused rather than profit but the reinvestigation process/finding a sponsor is intimidating.