“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.
To increase the real and perceived benefit of research funding, funding agencies should develop challenge goals for their extramural research programs focused on the impact portion of their mission.
Without trusted mechanisms to ensure privacy while enabling secure data access, essential R&D stalls, educational innovation stalls, and U.S. global competitiveness suffers.
Satellite imagery has long served as a tool for observing on-the-ground activity worldwide, and offers especially valuable insights into the operation, development, and physical features related to nuclear technology.
This year’s Red Sky Summit was an opportunity to further consider what the role of fire tech can and should be – and how public policy can support its development, scaling, and application.