As my colleague Nicole Ogrysko reported last week, the average time for the government to process security clearances grew steadily throughout fiscal 2015. For the subset of clearance seekers working under government contracts, things just got quite a bit worse.

Over the past month, an important piece of the clearance apparatus quietly ground to a near halt. Beginning on Dec. 8, the Defense Security Service all but ceased its processing of personnel security investigation requests for government contractors, and by the time things were up and running again on Jan. 5, a  new backlog of approximately 10,000 cases had built up.

The issue, according to DSS, is the budget gridlock the federal government faced at the end of last year. The stopgap continuing resolution, which funded agencies through the first quarter of fiscal 2016, provided less money than the agency needed to keep up with its workload at that point in the year, and by the beginning of December, the account the agency uses to fund industry background investigations when it approves and forwards them to the Office of Personnel Management was nearly dry.

Officials decided to hold off on most routine clearance requests and conserve their remaining funds to process the most critical investigations — for example, managerial-level clearances that would force work on critical government programs to literally shut down if they weren’t issued or renewed.

At that reduced rate, DSS spent most of December moving only 40 cases through the system per day until it officially received its full 2016 appropriation last week. That compares with the 650 cases that go in and out its doors on an average day, hence the new backlog.

Cindy McGovern, a DSS spokeswoman, said the agency has been able to surge to the point that it will now be able to process about 1,000 requests per day and start catching up with the pending workload, but that rate represents the agency’s maximum capacity.

And even at that rate, DSS currently estimates it will be about six months before the backlog is completely eliminated. The agency says it will work on the oldest requests first, but 650 new cases are still coming in every day.

We should emphasize this particular delay will only impact contractors seeking clearances — not government employees. That’s because DSS, which operates the National Industrial Security Program for DoD and 23 other agencies, only oversees industry clearance requests. It then hands the requests over to  OPM to perform the actual background investigations.

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