At ClearanceJobs Connect Colorado, a panel of security and technology leaders offered a candid look at how facility clearances are being modernized for a defense industrial base that’s growing faster than the government’s ability to vet it.
Jill Hamilton, ClearanceJobs’ content director, moderated a discussion with Trent Gillaspie, VP of Product at Industrial Systems Integrators (ISI), and Quinton Wilkes, the Chief Security Officer of Nooks, both partners in Turbo FCL — a DARPA-backed initiative aimed at streamlining the Facility Clearance (FCL) process.
The urgency, the panelists explained, stems from a policy shift: any company awarded a contract worth $5 million or more now must go through entity vetting, a process once reserved for large, foreign-owned firms. That change is pulling thousands of smaller and newer companies, many with no prior experience in the defense space, into an unfamiliar compliance process. Turbo FCL functions like “TurboTax” for clearances, guiding companies step-by-step through document requirements to reduce errors and rejected submissions.
AI, the panelists noted, is already doing heavy lifting in continuous vetting, replacing the old five-year periodic reinvestigation with near-constant automated checks. The intent isn’t to replace human judgment on security decisions, but to handle the administrative and information-gathering work faster and more accurately, freeing facility security officers to focus on higher-value analysis.
Looking ahead, DCSA’s new NI2 system will merge personnel and facility clearance data into a single platform, potentially using Turbo FCL as a front-end feeder. The panelists’ biggest ask for the next five years wasn’t more automation, but better information-sharing: enabling companies and agencies to exchange vetting data through APIs rather than re-submitting the same forms across every contract and agency.
