Industry’s asking DCSA for something reasonable: show us the data. Continuous vetting was supposed to make clearance management faster and smarter—automated alerts instead of periodic reinvestigations every five or ten years. The shift has helped cut the backlog for initial investigations, which matters when you’re trying to get new hires billable. But now that CV alerts are live at scale, contractors are running into a different problem: adjudication timelines that nobody can predict.
At a recent NISPPAC meeting, ManTech’s LaToya Coleman put it plainly—some CV alerts are taking long enough to resolve that cleared employees can’t transition to new programs or contracts. If there’s an open case, processing stops. Without metrics or projected timelines, FSOs and hiring managers are flying blind. The ask isn’t complicated: share resolution data, give us a sense of what to expect, and loop facility security officers into the process instead of only reaching out to the clearance holder directly.
The scale is real. DoE flagged more than 502,000 alerts in a single quarter, though they expect that number to drop as DCSA takes over more triage work. DHS processed over 500,000 CV alerts last quarter with a 13-day average adjudication—92% classified as low risk. That’s the kind of transparency that helps. DCSA says they’re working on it, and I hope they move quickly. Continuous vetting is a better model than what we had, but only if the people managing cleared talent can plan around it.