DOGE vs. the Republic of Security Clearance–Holders

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has outlined an ambitious agenda and is rapidly gaining momentum. Beyond organizations, programs, and grants, however, lies a realm that has defied reform. It encompasses elected officials, civilians, military service members, intelligence officers, and private sector professionals. It spans retirees to interns, massive domestic installations to austere overseas outposts. It totals nearly three million individuals and the waiting list to join is several months long. Most of all, its power is information, and it guards its privileges jealously and unyieldingly. DOGE may have no greater challenge than tackling the Republic of Security Clearance–Holders.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-principals of DOGE, have identified three major areas of reform—regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. Unfortunately, the realm of classified information cannot be located in a single regulation, administrative entity, or budget line. DOGE won’t be able to highlight single examples of egregious waste or incompetent leadership. The entire enterprise is sprawling, complex, opaque, and nearly impenetrable.

Prior to 2018, the Office of Personnel Management oversaw approximately 95 percent of all background investigations. In 2019, DOD assumed responsibility. The Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) now similarly conducts about 95 percent of all background investigations for the executive branch, and at least 21 federal agencies have the authority to conduct all or some of their own investigations.

The source for the above three million figure is four years old—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Fiscal Year 2019 Annual Report on Security Clearance Determinations. According to this report, 2.9 million individuals possessed active security clearances, approximately the population of Mississippi, the nation’s 35th-largest state; that number was a nearly 170,000 increase over the previous fiscal year, a population on par with Huntsville, Alabama. Moreover, an additional 1.3 million individuals were “eligible” (the population of Maine, the 42nd-largest state), persons who had clearances but weren’t currently using them.

According to performance.gov reporting, as of October 2024, the backlog for investigations to obtain a clearance totals almost 300,000, well above the target of 200,000. The average number of days, end to end, to initiate, investigate, and adjudicate a secret or top secret clearance is 90 and 176, higher than the goal of 74 and 114 days, respectively.

The Government Accountability Office has listed security clearances as a High-Risk Area—those governmental functions that are singularly vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement, or that need broad reform—since 2018.

Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s masterful Oppenheimer, Americans now know the security clearance process, even in its infancy, can be corrupted by bureaucratic politics and personal animus and weaponized against dissenters. Someone knows whether and how this is happening now—maybe the individual or individuals that hacked the OPM in 2015—just not the American public.

Equally unknown—and inherently unknowable—is the scope of classified information. Classification dates back to 1940, when the Roosevelt administration established a classification system which thereafter governed classification decisions through the Second World War.

With the advent of nuclear weapons, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act in 1946 to protect sensitive scientific programs. Subsequent executive orders established automatic declassification schedules, prohibitions on classifying certain information, and mandatory reviews of classified information.

Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers and Senator Frank Church’s investigation into illegal intelligence activities introduced the public to the classified realm, but only minimally. The end of the Cold War finally provided the occasion to lift the veil whereby the Clinton Administration initiated a comprehensive declassification of documentation classified during that period.

Yet the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequent global war on terrorism initiated substantially expanded intelligence collection, overseas military operations, and covert activities, resulting in significant new amounts of classified materials.

In 2010, the Obama Administration issued an executive order revising classification policies and established a National Declassification Center (NDC) in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The order tasked the NDC with eliminating a more than 400 million–page backlog of classified records older than 25 years old. The order additionally directed the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), also within NARA, to oversee overall implementation.

Such declassification provides the only clue as to the total amount of classified information.

According to a 2017 ISOO annual report, the number of reviewed and declassified pages totaled approximately 84 million and 46 million, respectively. (The 2017 report was the last to report such information and it omitted some categories of information.)

The aforementioned 400 million–page backlog was to be completed by 2014. Given the pace of declassification in 2017, the small number of full-time employees assigned to declassification (1,877), and the continuing automatic declassification of material, the backlog probably runs to several billions of pages which, again, is only a fraction of the total.

Given the fundamental criticality of information, this breadth of classified information makes its purveyors powerful—very powerful.

“Need to know” bespeaks more than prudent security protocol; it is an exclusionary device that denotes one’s absence from an elite within an elite.

Clearances nominally elevate the quality of the possessor’s knowledge and insight. Classification presumedly signals acquisition by means of risky operations or advanced technologies. Secrecy implies decisions made on the basis of reasons within reasons, motives within motives.

Concurrent digitization, however, has provided would-be leakers and whistleblowers with the means to access and distribute an amount of information several orders magnitude greater than the Pentagon Papers.

In 2010, Julian Assange published over 250,000 State Department cables as well as video footage during the Iraq War of an airstrike that resulted in the deaths of civilians. In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former intelligence employee and contractor, revealed the existence of numerous government programs collecting information on American citizens’ communications.

During the Manhattan Project, the information being protected concerned nuclear research and development; in the present day, the information being restricted encompasses inconvenient facts, embarrassing events, or violations of civil liberties. Assange and Snowden accomplished what presidential guidance could not and exposed an elite at odds with the public.

As outlined in Martin Gurri’s prescient The Revolt of the Public, technology has overturned elites’ monopolies over information around the world and spawned an information sphere accessible to anyone. In this regard, Assange and Snowden’s disclosures exposed the insolvency of elite pronouncements and eroded the legitimacy granted it by the public.

Amidst such erosion, Gurri warned that the raging epistemological clash within the information sphere would provide the conditions for the rise of a populist figure poised to capitalize on an outraged public.

“Drain the swamp” has been a recurrent mantra of MAGA, a sentiment that resonates when one contrasts the way the Justice Department handled the investigations into Biden’s and Trump’s handling of classified materials. An exculpatory report versus a property raid justifiably struck the public as patently unfair and fueled the desire to oust the elite, which has only been corrupted by privileged access to information.

The classified information edifice can’t simply be eliminated en masse. The government is justified in maintaining secrets and bounding access to the same.

DOGE could begin by declassifying material covering specific subjects and already older than twenty-five years. DOGE could also strip clearance-holders who have weaponized this status. The 51 spies who asserted the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian misinformation should be the first.

Fundamentally, the Snowden episode is extraordinarily instructive. Numerous officials and observers variously condemned Snowden as a defector for fleeing to Russia.

Snowden countered, “If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public.”

The rebuttal perfectly encapsulates the state of affairs and the distance between American citizens and the classification regime and the morass into which DOGE wades.

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