There’s another angle to this that I would like to share, about the tendency to keep senior managers in access: I used to work at a company that once had lots of classified work, including a number of programs requiring SCI access for different customers. Whereas in the past it was easy to keep people cleared even if they were not working an SCI program. in the past few years, it all became much more closely managed. The numbers went way down, especially as we had less and less compartmented business. Collateral clearances were not a problem, lots of people had ‘secret’ who hadn’t worked a classified program in quite a while.
Yet for some reason, we were able to keep high level managers in access! I don’t know if this was a company decision or if the government somehow supported it, but rather than keep someone in active status who stood a chance of doing some actual work, these senior managers would be ‘active’ when all they did was chase new business or maybe participate in the occasional high-level meeting with the customer. After I left, I heard we had fewer than 20 people still ‘active’ and only about five of them were engineers… the rest were all managers.