Anyone have any inside knowledge on the current backlog at DODCAF or if there is a backlog?
This fairly recent article suggests a backlog of about 53,000 at DoDCAF: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/other-dod-agencies/2019/03/as-nbib-shrinks-the-security-clearance-backlog-other-personnel-vetting-agencies-feel-the-pressure/
Is that a significant backlog? Seems to pale in comparison to the OPM backlog. Sounds good that there seems to be a sense of urgency to get cases adjudicated though.
There are many more investigators than reviewers… more reviewers than adjudicators. The process is like a funnel with the adjudicators being at the end of the funnel.
This seems to be a pretty big backlog since, as @backgdinvestigator said, there are significantly fewer adjudicators than investigators.
If you look at the website that I originally linked to, you can see that during the time period that the backlog shrank (since about this time last year), investigation time has gone down for initial Secret, but adjudication time just lately went up for initial Secret, indicating that the bottleneck is now with adjudication rather than initiation or investigation.
I’ve been in adjudication around week and half to two weeks . So I guess it could be adjudicated tomorrow or 6 months from now. I don’t know if the 10-15 day adjudication timeframe that those charts depict for a Top Secret is accurate or not. My investigation took 8 months alone but that was fast according to the person from the OPM hotline.
Any number that is given to you is questionable in usefulness. The numbers given are averages (in this case, medians for the fastest 90% of cases, so it excludes the heavy outliers), and averages aren’t very useful for predicting future data points. There’s also a good amount of spread from time, just like the Secret adjudication times jumping from 15 to 41 days between two FY quarters.
As you said, it could be tomorrow or 6 months from now. Just strap in and hope for the best.