Industry’s asking DCSA for something pretty straightforward: show us the data on continuous vetting. The shift away from periodic reinvestigations was supposed to speed things up—and it has, for initial clearances. But now that CV alerts are flowing for nearly a million contractor employees, some of those cases are sitting longer than anyone expected, and that’s keeping cleared people off contract.
The scale is real. DoE flagged over 500,000 alerts in a single quarter; DHS processed a similar number and adjudicated most in under two weeks. That’s the system working. But when an alert stays open and you need to move someone to a new program, everything stops. No metrics, no timeline, no visibility—just a cleared professional in limbo and a program short a body. FSOs are asking to be looped in earlier, which makes sense; they know their people and can often resolve issues faster than a cold call from an investigator.
DCSA says it’s working on sharing more information about alert resolution. Good. Continuous vetting is the right direction, but if industry can’t plan around it or understand what’s driving delays, the efficiency gains get eaten by uncertainty. We’ve all run searches where clearance processing was the long pole. CV was supposed to fix part of that. Now we need the transparency to make sure it does.