Notorious NSA leaker Snowden is now alleged to have undergone a slipshod background investigation by a contract firm, inspiring some political observers to opine that neither sensitive investigations nor classified information belong in the hands of contractors. (For details, consult articles such as Reuters’ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-usa-security-usis-idUSBRE95J13120130621.) This assertion is catchy, serious-sounding, and absolutely devoid of merit. It is beside the point. Here is why.
The problem is not who does the background check but how well – or whether – it is performed. This is a problem of management, not affiliation. In other words, like most management problems, it lends itself to solution by focused attention, which includes proper training, supervision, and quality control. Such problems are by no means limited to the private sector. Indeed, anyone with direct experience of government and contract employees enmeshed in the security clearance process soon realizes that there are sound reasons for much of the clearance work to find itself in the hands of contractors rather than government employees. These reasons include timeliness, accountability, and competence – as long as basic management of the process remains sound. An example may illustrate this point.
One of my periodic update investigations for a Top Secret security clearance was conducted by a contract investigator whom I later got to know in a community service club. Long after my clearance was a distant memory, he answered my questions about what the process entailed from his end. A retired, competent ATF agent, this fellow ran his own private investigations firm and took on a number of cases as a contract background investigator. All these cases were time-sensitive and labor-intensive, requiring him to complete several interviews and to develop extra sources to interview beyond names which subjects of investigation like me had supplied on their security clearance forms. In each case, the clock was ticking, and there were incentives for investigators to turn in their findings promptly, as well as disincentives for tardy or incomplete responses. The fellow I met was mature, savvy, and very, very good. His integrity was unimpeachable, and he generally outperformed rookie federal employees of other agencies who were doing similar work. Why? He was experienced, a self-starter, and a good judge of character with a sense of where to look for additional detail. He also had no problem delivering results on a deadline.
Contrast this kind of performance with many government organizations, and the attractiveness of contract investigations grows exponentially. And it is not the fault of the investigators themselves, as government and contract background investigators often come from the same gene pool and skill set. The difference in the government ranks is in the clotting that occurs in the parts of the bureaucracy that vastly outnumber the investigators. There are administrative staffers and multiple layers of supervisors, managers, and form-slingers whose existence only a government organization will perpetuate. And they just cannot turn around investigations or achieve marginally competitive throughput compared to their contractors. This is why the bureaucracy overseeing national security clearances saw multiple reorganizations and still found itself buried under a backlog of some 600,000 or so pending security clearance background checks in the aftermath of 9/11/01.
Has this situation changed in the intervening years? Hardly. My experience at a recent security conference was revealing, if a bit disheartening. A senior representative of the obscure government office responsible for making security clearance determinations, called adjudications in the trade, explained the hurdles he had to surmount in order to obtain approval to address this conference – despite having attended it for well over a dozen years in a row and having applied for internal approvals half a year in advance. His bosses insisted on reviewing his presentation and approved it only after apparently insisting that he made appropriate political mention of how the backlog of clearances was being greatly reduced but was now going to suffer by X percent in delayed adjudications because of the 2013 budget sequester. To draw a bleaker picture, this government representative went to great lengths to explain how his office was poised to realize impressive modernization through the addition of new management positions recently staffed by retiring colonels, captains, and other government careerists of no demonstrable expertise in the functions doled out to them like sinecures as rewards from appreciative political patrons.
Now, imagine a contractor involved in the exact same work telling a government overseer that it would not meet its contractual obligations this year not because contract payments were lagging but because extra money was not being allocated. This would in effect be beating one’s chest while trumpeting an intent to default on one’s contract. Is this acceptable? No, it is not, which is why timely background investigations are much more likely to be performed by an incentive-driven organization.
Bureaucracies sit on things. They have no internal output incentive or institutional grasp consistent with alacrity. This, in turn, brings them to contractors as the only means of getting the job done.
The problem with a contractor which claims to be performing background investigations while allowing inept or ethically challenged investigators to get away with falsifying investigative findings is a management deficiency. What are missing are controls, spot checks, adequate supervision, and basic due diligence. These deficiencies apply not only to the contract firm responsible for the background checks but also to the government customer cashing a paycheck for allegedly overseeing this process.
To define this debacle as emblematic of the difference between relying on government employees vs. private contractors is to miss the point. This is a management failure, pure and simple. If heads are to roll they should be the disposable noggins of paycheck-stealing apparatchiks, starting with lazy background investigators and ending with the contractor and government supervisors and managers who were supposed to check their work and keep them honest.
-- Nick Catrantzos
