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.
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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.