For years, security clearance reform has been measured by a single number: how long it takes to process a clearance.
That metric mattered. But it was also incomplete.
The latest Trusted Workforce 2.0 Quarterly Progress Report (QPR) released by the Security, Suitability, and Credentialing Performance Accountability Council (PAC) signals something important: the government is rethinking how it measures personnel vetting performance entirely.
And for those of us who have spent years watching the clearance process evolve, that shift toward **better metrics — not just faster timelines — is a meaningful step in reform progress.
What Trusted Workforce 2.0 Is Trying to Fix
Trusted Workforce 2.0 is the government’s multi-year effort to modernize the personnel vetting system that governs security clearances, federal employment suitability, and credentialing across the executive branch.
The reform effort has aimed to tackle long-standing problems in the clearance process, including:
- slow hiring timelines
- redundant investigative processes
- outdated forms and IT systems
- a lack of meaningful performance metrics
But modernization efforts can only succeed if they’re measured properly.
Recognizing that, the PAC adopted four primary goals in June 2025 to evaluate whether personnel vetting reform is actually working. The new QPR framework is built around those goals:
- Get People to Work Faster
- Streamline vetting processes so agencies can quickly fill positions and reduce hiring delays.
- Eliminate Waste
- Reduce inefficiencies, streamline workflows, and eliminate redundant tasks across the vetting enterprise.
- Optimize Risk Management
- Balance personnel security risks against the time, cost, and resources required to mitigate those risks.
- Strengthen Experience & Engagement
- Make vetting processes, tools, and performance metrics easier for applicants, agencies, and security professionals to understand and navigate.
Those goals reflect something many cleared professionals already know: the personnel vetting system isn’t just about investigations.
It’s about hiring, workforce readiness, and national security talent pipelines.
And the latest quarterly report shows the government beginning to measure those outcomes differently.
The Old Way: One Metric to Rule Them All
Historically, personnel vetting performance was measured by end-to-end processing time—the number of days between submitting a clearance application and receiving an adjudication.
Those numbers drove policy conversations for more than a decade. Congress asked about them. Agencies were judged by them. And industry recruiters lived and died by them.
But end-to-end timeliness never told the full story.
Most cleared professionals don’t wait for final adjudication to start work. Roughly 80% of vetted workers can begin their job based on a preliminary determination while the full investigation continues.
That means the single metric everyone focused on often didn’t reflect the real experience of either the candidate or the hiring organization.
The new QPR acknowledges that reality.
The New Scorecard: Measuring the Candidate Experience
The FY26 Q1 report represents a shift from tracking a single outcome to tracking the entire personnel vetting ecosystem.
Instead of focusing solely on how fast cases close, the updated framework introduces metrics designed to measure:
- Form quality and rejection rates
- Adoption of new vetting technology
- Automation in adjudication
- Candidate experience indicators
For example, the report highlights questionnaire rejection rates as a key metric. Today, roughly 4% of submitted vetting questionnaires are rejected, forcing applicants to correct forms and resubmit them—adding delays and frustration to the process. The government’s goal is to reduce that rejection rate to 1% as new systems and forms roll out.
That may sound like a small number, but for the millions of personnel vetting actions conducted each year, even a few percentage points represent tens of thousands of avoided delays.
It’s also a metric that actually reflects something applicants experience directly, and that they can help control.
The Rise of the New Personnel Vetting Questionnaire
One of the most significant developments in the report is the first measurable progress toward adoption of the Personnel Vetting Questionnaire (PVQ)—the long-awaited successor to the SF-86.
The QPR notes that the first PVQ submissions were collected in FY26 Q2, marking the beginning of a phased transition to the new investigative form. Adoption is expected to start slowly and accelerate as new investigative capabilities are deployed to support it.
For the cleared workforce, the PVQ represents more than a new form. It’s part of a broader shift toward:
- digitally native vetting
- automated investigative workflows
- less redundant paperwork
Anyone who has filled out a clearance application more than once knows how overdue that modernization is.
Killing the Zombie Process: Periodic Reinvestigations
Another data point buried in the report shows just how dramatically Trusted Workforce 2.0 is changing legacy processes.
The government has largely replaced periodic reinvestigations (PRs) with continuous vetting, but some agencies continued requesting the old PR process out of habit.
According to the QPR, PAC-led initiatives have reduced those unnecessary PR requests by 99%.
That’s a quiet but meaningful milestone. PRs were one of the most resource-intensive parts of the legacy system, often triggering full reinvestigations even when nothing had changed.
Continuous vetting, by contrast, allows agencies to monitor risk signals continuously rather than re-investigating on a fixed cycle.
Another piece of the modernization effort highlighted in the report focuses on something cleared professionals have long asked for: visibility into the process.
The government is developing an Individual Engagement Platform (IEP)—essentially a one-stop portal where applicants can interact directly with the personnel vetting process. Early capabilities are expected to include the ability for individuals to track the status of their investigation and submit required self-reporting information through a single interface.
If implemented well, the IEP could address one of the most common frustrations in the clearance process: applicants often have little insight into where their case stands once their paperwork is submitted. A centralized engagement platform would give candidates clearer visibility while also reducing administrative burden for security offices managing those cases.
Why These Metrics Matter
For years, critics of the clearance process argued that the government lacked meaningful performance data about how the system actually functioned.
The new QPR structure begins addressing that gap.
It introduces metrics that track not just how long the process takes, but why delays occur and where improvements are working.
And perhaps most importantly, it begins acknowledging something candidates have said for years: the biggest pain points in personnel vetting aren’t just timelines.
They’re things like:
- confusing forms
- unclear instructions
- lack of transparency about status
- duplicate submissions and fingerprints
The QPR even notes that these “lived experience” issues have historically been difficult to measure—one reason the PAC plans to expand data collection around them in future reports.
What This Means for the Cleared Workforce
For cleared professionals and government contractors, the biggest takeaway from the report isn’t a specific metric.
It’s the fact that the government is measuring the system differently, and taking candidate experience seriously.
Clearance reform has often stalled because leaders were trying to fix a complex system using a single metric. The updated QPR acknowledges that the personnel vetting enterprise is far more complicated—and requires a broader performance dashboard.
For a workforce that depends on security clearances to do its job, that shift toward data-driven reform may ultimately matter more than shaving a few days off the processing timeline.
Because if the government can finally measure the clearance system accurately, it might finally be able to fix it.
