Hagel Orders 'Troubling Gaps' Closed in DOD Background Checks, May Cut Clearances

Defense Department personnel with secret clearances soon will face tougher "continuous evaluation," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said, heeding the recommendations of three separate investigations into last year’s Washington Navy Yard shooting.

The department’s actions, Hagel said, fulfill his pledge to correct “gaps or inadequacies in the department's security” that facilitated the September massacre of 12 people by Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old federal contractor and Navy veteran.

“The reviews identified troubling gaps in DOD's ability to detect, prevent and respond to instances where someone working for us -- a government employee, a member of our military or a contractor -- decides to inflict harm on this institution and its people,” Hagel said, at the Pentagon, on Tuesday.

As a result of the findings, the Defense Department will begin automated reviews of personnel records that will tie together “law enforcement and other relevant databases” to alert officials to “derogatory information” such as arrests. The department will set up an “inside threat management and analysis center” to review the records. Base security also will be stepped up and databases that manage Defense Department employee records will be better linked, Hagel said.

Additionally, Hagel is considering cutting the number of personnel with security clearances “by at least 10 percent,” he said, or roughly 250,000 people, and whether to cease outsourcing DOD background checks to the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management, or OPM.

More than 5.1 million federal government and contractor employees either held or were eligible to hold a security clearance in February, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. OPM currently performs most background investigations as part of the clearance process.

Alexis -- who held a secret clearance -- was a contractor tasked with updating computer systems on Navy and Marine Corps bases. Alexis killed 12 of his coworkers on Sept. 16, 2013, after entering the Navy Yard with a shotgun in his rental car. Police killed him after a nearly half-hour standoff with base security personnel.

The current system for reassessing potential security risks among personnel with security clearances only occurs “on a periodic reinvestigation basis -- five years, 10 years,” said Marcel Lettre, principal deputy under secretary for defense for intelligence, at the Pentagon press conference. “That approach limits our ability to understand the evolution that may occur in a person’s life that may have them evolve from a [trusted] insider to an inside threat.”

[Click for Defense One coverage of the Navy Yard]

The Defense Department’s internal investigation found Alexis’ employer, The Experts, Inc., was unaware of his previous “chronic personal conduct issues,” while in the Navy. Additionally, “Alexis’ employer did not report behaviors indicating psychological instability and did not seek assistance from a mental health professional or guidance from the Defense Security Service,” the investigators concluded. The Navy command in charge of Alexis also did not report multiple incidents into the security system. 

The proposed changes will not offer real-time alerts on potentially untrustworthy insiders soon, Lettre said. That sort of technique will come “as the system matures."

“It’s not to say that as times change and as technology changes, as what the government deduces is a useful input to the security clearance process -- as those evolve over time we want to make sure we build a system that can accommodate those changes in practice,” he added.

The continuous evaluation measures would affect all clearance-holding personnel, amounting to approximately 2.5 million individuals with active clearances. “Implementation will have to occur over time,” Lettre said.

A separate central authority post to be headed by one individual is also in the works. That post combines the responsibilities for physical security that are currently “fractured among multiple components within the department,” Hagel said.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the service would implement all of Hagel’s recommendations as quickly as possible.

The changes announced Tuesday stem from three separate reviews: the internal Defense Department review, an independent investigation and one by the Navy Judge Advocate General.

“Far too many people have security clearances,” said Paul Stockton, former assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and Americas' security affairs, who co-authored the independent review with retired Adm. Eric Olson, former Special Operations Command commander. “Since [Sept. 11, 2011], the number of those eligible for security clearances in the Department of Defense has tripled.”