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.
Comments
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.