Security Clearance Management in the Spotlight – an Interview with OMB’s Deputy

Hi. This is Lindy Kyzer, and welcome. Today, I am really excited to have Jason Miller on the program. Mr. Miller is the Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget, where he serves as the Federal government’s Chief Operating Officer. Also very significant to the topic around security clearance reform, which is what we spend a lot of time chatting about here at Security Clearance and Security, is the fact that he’s the Chair of the Security, Suitability and Credentialing Performance Accountability Council, PAC Program Management Office, PAC PMO, OMB. I think your government acronym bingo card should be full at this point. I appreciate you so much, Mr. Miller, for taking the time to chat with us today.

Thank you. Thank you for the time.

If we’re talking about security clearance issues, we tend to talk a lot over at ClearanceJobs about DCSA, who obviously has a heavy lift when it comes to background investigations, we talk a lot about ODNI who gets to talk about those fun topics around drugs and policy around that. What is the role of OMB or even the PAC PMO when it comes to the security clearance process?

Sure. You are right in that DCSA, ODNI and OPM all have really important government-wide responsibilities. For OMB, both as chair of the PAC and in our role more broadly, is we are driving forward the overall transformation of the personnel vetting system for the Federal enterprise. That means that as we bring together the heads of ODUI, the Undersecretary at DOD, the Director of OPM, to make sure that we are moving the entire enterprise forward in a consistent manner, it is my responsibility to have implementation timelines, ensure that the choreography of activity across the different enterprises fits together, ensure that we’re prioritizing both our time and our resources, and that we’re being appropriately ambitious in terms of what we’re trying to achieve, not just when we’re trying to achieve it. It is very much a management role consistent with my title and making sure that we’re pushing the different component pieces that have enterprise-wide roles, and then bringing the individual Federal agencies which have to take a whole set of actions, bringing them along, and using the other tools of OMB when appropriate, including the budget.

I’m glad you mentioned ambitious because that ties into my next question. The reason I invited you on the program is because the recent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, you dropped some great news when it came to security clearance processing time, metrics and benchmarks, and also a pretty significant move for a wonky community that cares about these topics around reporting on a hundred percent of the community and not just 90%. So traditionally, we’ll release security clearance processing time benchmarks, those have always been just the fastest 90% of cases. So talk about the move to a hundred percent reporting, which my feedback from my community has been that is something that they are really excited about and a major muscle movement in this process.

Thank you, and appreciate the reference to the recent hearing, it was an important one for us and have been working with Chairman Warner on this topic, and I know he has been working on this for a very long time and is deeply knowledgeable about some of the ins and outs of the overall security clearance process. I think when you look at the change we’re trying to make, it’s important to start with why we are measuring what we’re currently measuring. So if you look back to 20 years ago when some of this measurement, a little less than 20 years ago when some of this measurement was put into place, it was to make sure that we actually had our arms around and could manage the vast majority of cases. And that was the right thing to do at that point in time.

Now, I would expect, and this I expect this is the true for your community, the vast majority of time we spend talking about problems often is in the 10% of cases that we are not actually measuring. And if we’re not measuring something, it’s very hard to manage it and to improve it. The move forward here is to actually look at all, a hundred percent, of the cases that are going through the overall system and setting our metrics accordingly, to targets for the overall a hundred percent. And you’re right, that is a big deal. That also means that today, to some extent, we’re overstating how well we are doing because we’re not measuring and reporting on the other 10%. That’s an important change. It will mean we capture everything inside of it, and when we are moving towards our new ambitious targets, which I’m happy to talk about, they’re even more ambitious than the delta between what we currently target today in those numbers because of that capture of the longest cases that are going through the end-to-end security clearance processing system.

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the targets. Why the shift to move those and make those more aggressive at this point? It seems like there’s so much going on right now, you might have pushback to say, hey, let’s not improve things, right? Or move those metrics around. Maybe speak to why you’ve announced new benchmarks for reporting times.

Targets are important both from a external communication of what do we expect to achieve with all of the set different pieces of activity that is underway, and it’s really important from an internal management standpoint in terms of what are the changes that we need to make to our processes, and it’s actually very hard to prioritize unless we have a finish line in mind. So for both of those, here’s what we’re going to get from the reforms that are in place and the overall transformation effort, and then what’s the work that we need to do, inside the tent, on optimizing all of the different process steps. We need those targets for both of those things.

The end-to-end vetting process targets that we are aiming for, consistent with the move to three tiers, low, moderate, and high, is for low 25 days. That’s application through final adjudication. Forty days for moderate, and 75 for high tier. We already talked about the shift tonight from 90 to a hundred and how that is a huge change. Today, top secret, so comparable to what we’ll say high tier, our goal is 114 days for the 90%, we’re moving to 75. Not only that, but we’re moving from not when the application is completed, but from when the application is sent, so we’re capturing more of the process. That’s also because we’re trying to improve that piece of the process, so we want to be able to measure it as well.

The other thing that we announced, in terms of metrics, was a new measure, which is favorability to onboard. And that’s a really key component where we’re not just thinking about the overall end vetting process, but for mission reasons we need people doing the job. So how quickly can we get people doing the job, and for that, low tier 21 days, so not that much additional time relative to the end-to-end process, for high tier 30 to 45 days. So we’re getting people into seat at the end of this overall effort meaningfully faster than our already meaningfully faster set of targets that we’re putting into place.

I mean, those are significant metrics and really important ones. I think when we talked to our community of both the government agencies and defense contractors trying to onboard people, that favorable to onboard is a really significant metric that you’re adding because that’s dollars and cents in terms of both contracts and the Federal government’s ability to do its job. So very exciting. I want to talk a little bit about NBIS and CV, because those are the big muscle movements around Trusted Workforce and PAC PMO is providing a ton of updates and insights into that. How important are those elements to the processes and to being able to have this favorable to onboard better benchmarks, a hundred percent reporting, all of that?

NBIS is very much like the long pole in the tent in the overall transformation effort, that has been true throughout my, now, just closing in on two years in this role, including as the Chair of the PAC. At the very beginning of the new set of PAC principles coming on board, we worked closely with DCSA and the broader DOD team to make sure that we were providing to the overall PAC, to the interagency, visibility on the key deployment milestones, key objectives associated with NBIS because it’s not just the development of it’s also the use of NBIS by the federal enterprise. As we look to this year, the move from eQIP to eApp is a major shift in a very short period of time that we are driving. It is implementation priority number one, and we have seen successful steps over the last two in moving people into continuous vetting.

The move in continuous vetting now is on the non-sensitive public trust population that we are trying to move into continuous vetting. We’ve already moved the national security sensitive population in, we have about 4.4 million people that are utilizing continuous vetting, and then we’re continuing to improve the system for continuous vetting as well. So we’ve moved people into what we call 1.5, on the path to 2.0. So a lot of progress, yes, a lot of different moving pieces, and I have to commend the DOD and DCSA team on just the overall continued march forward on eMBIS development and onboarding agencies and also the thousands and thousands of private organizations that are going to need to use that system.

You’re kind of tied to that, so this is truly an interagency effort involving a lot of different players and parts and pieces. Can you maybe speak to the PAC PMO role in gathering all those folks together and how you work with the executive agents to move all of these moving pieces of the reform effort forward?

Yeah. The PAC PMO is important, it’s a Program Management Office, is driving forward all of the component pieces, holding the different owners accountable on deadlines, and then bringing people together to surface issues and resolve issues. That’s what a good PMO does. That team is excellent at it, and we harness that to make sure that leaders at the PAC level are able to have visibility on where we have any sticky wickets, that we then need to either reprioritize, that we need to make a set of decisions around on how we’re going to move the ball forward. But that’s been a really key tool and we would not be where we are but for the creation and the successful execution by the PAC PMO.

Yeah, I mean, also from my vantage point, it is an incredibly important effort. If you go to Performance.gov, you are providing quarterly updates on that process. I think when we see security clearances in the news, it’s painful to me because I see all of the lack of awareness of people not understanding the process, even though there is a lot of data and metrics out there that PAC PMO is providing when it comes to, how big is the security clearance population? People act like that’s a surprise. You were tracking those figures. You have a ton of benchmarks, not just the processing time benchmarks. So maybe even, can you speak to that? The oversight and awareness function, providing those quarterly updates and why that’s really important to the security clearance process?

It is. One, there’s a lot of stakeholders. Per us doing this conversation, there’s a lot of stakeholders who are interested in the changes that we are making because it has meaningful impact. We provide those quarterly updates both from a transparency standpoint, people want to see the progress that we’re making, know what the implications are for them, for their organizations. But it’s also a key management tool. By being transparent about these numbers, it holds us, it holds the interagency, accountable to make sure that we’re delivering. We’re not only transparent on the numbers, we’re transparent on what our target dates are for completion of various steps. Again, that’s important because others might need to take their own actions associated with those different timelines, but by putting those measures out there publicly, not just in an internal document, we are accountable to the public because we’ve promised to achieve things on a set set of dates.

You’re accountable to Congress for those. I feel like the SSCI hearing was a key moment in that; you are going to get updates from Congress. I do love Senator Warner because he is the only person who’s probably as geeky about this stuff as me, or more so. But he’s asking questions and making that feedback loop when it comes to what is going on, and then we see that baked into the Intelligence Authorization Act, and it is this ongoing conversation dance happening, and I again see your office and interagency effort at OMB coordinating all of that.

Yeah, and the hearing is an important moment for us to lift up in public on the record, talk about where we are, what the issues are, what questions Senators have. But we also work with that committee very closely, and not only are we providing public information, but we’re providing regular briefings to the committee and relevant staff. And their feedback’s helpful to us too because they’re hearing from various stakeholders, they’re hearing about issues as well, and so that feedback helps us make sure we’re pushing on the right things.

Fantastic. Well, I so appreciate your time. I think this is a critical moment in personnel security and vetting, always. Again, I see huge muscle movement around the move to a hundred percent reporting timelines, and I so appreciate that. I think that will be a critical transparency effort. Do you have timelines, so when do those benchmarks, a hundred percent reporting, when are we going to start seeing those in the figures that are released?

It’s going to require a number of different changes. We know that they are ambitious in some respect, aspirational for what we’re trying to achieve. We’re looking at something that is out into the future, i.e. four to five years out from now, once we complete all of the various transformation steps. And there’s still some things that we haven’t identified that we’re going to identify, another reason that having those ambitious targets is going to be necessary for us because it’s going to force us to keep identifying different ways in which we can improve. We think they’re achievable. It’s definitely not going to be an overnight set of activities, there’s not going to be a moment where we flip a switch. We’re taking lots of deliberate actions and we have to shift. This is part of what we were saying in the hearing, we have to shift from the current system, which we are still leaning on very heavily, to a new way of doing business. And with that new way of doing business and process improvements, this is where we believe we can get.