“The Administration has taken significant steps to improve the process by which the Federal Government grants individuals access to classified information,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a recent report (pdf) on security clearances.
“The average time it takes today to complete the security clearance process has been reduced by 18 days, or 6 percent.”
That is, instead of an FY 2005 average of 297 days to get a security clearance, the average wait in the first quarter of FY 2006 dropped to 279 days.
The proposed goal for December 2006 is 134 days.
See “Report on The Status of Executive Branch Efforts to Improve the Security Clearance Process,” Office of Management and Budget, February 2006.
The OMB report was first reported by Rati Bishnoi in Inside the Pentagon on July 6, 2006.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.