A new Office of the Director of National Intelligence report has found a 5.9 percent decline in the number of federal government employees and contractors who were eligible for a security clearance in fiscal year 2015.
ODNI said in the report that there were 4,249,053 security clearance-eligible individuals in October 2015, compared with 4,514,576 in October 2014.
According to the report, federal agencies saw a 2.1 percent drop in the number of individuals who were eligible to hold a security clearance as well as gain access to classified information between October 2014 and October 2015.
The agency also found that the number of people who were entitled to a security clearance but were not allowed to access confidential data decreased by 203,449 from FY 2014 to FY 2015, showing a 12.8 percent decline.
The document also noted that such reductions in clearance eligibility were associated with the Defense Department’s efforts to implement several data quality initiatives.
ODNI prepared the 2015 Report on Security Clearance Determinations in compliance with the FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act.
The special security directorate under ODNI’s national counterintelligence and security center collected and processed data from DoD’s Joint Personnel Adjudication System, Office of Personnel Management’s Central Verification System and ODNI’s Scattered Castles repository in order to determine the security volume levels for government employees and contractors.
