I’ve been waiting for my TS/SCI clearance for ODNI (applying as a civilian employee, not contractor) to go through since April. I should be in adjudication, but neither HR nor the security team could tell me anything about my clearance’s status when I asked at the beginning of July. I’ve had complete silence since, even for emails asking other questions. Given the current government turmoil, I’m sure ODNI is dealing with a lot of internal chaos, and I was recently made aware that Scattered Castles has a help desk where you can ask them directly about your clearance status.
If this is true, would it be worth going above my ODNI contacts and calling SC, or would that action reflect badly on me and make ODNI annoyed enough to want to pull my offer and stop my clearance process?
Is it even worth contacting SC - is there a possibility that my clearance has been approved and ODNI isn’t telling me because they’re waiting for the hiring freeze to end first so they can onboard me? If that’s the case, I’d want to know so I can take my clearance and apply to other jobs.
probably held up given the freeze…or I’d actually argue any hiring at ODNI is likely over.
Just saw this… the ODNI has grown wildly beyond all reason. Most people at ODNI are there on “details” from other agencies; the article mentions determining an ODNI “head count” which I supposed means how many actual ODNI employees there will be.
One additional comment: the idea of a single intelligence community director goes back a long time. The CIA director was also the Director of Central Intelligence, and until the creation of ODNI was also supposed to run the IC. But the DCI didn’t really have the resources to do that and there were always concerns that the DCI would have a CIA bias. Before the creation of ODNI there was some kind of “IC Staff” but I am not sure how much clout it had. Anyway there are a series of memos going back to the 1970s recommending the creation of such an office; but it took 9/11 and the Iraq WMD mess to finally bring it about.
I do not know what ODNI does now except create a bunch of joint duty assignments (JDA) that look good on people’s promotion packets. They do get involved in large scale acquisitions, which is an important function, and they do publish IC directives which do help coordinate things. Maybe the DNI is responsible for the President’s Daily Brief, and I think they may be the “home” agency for the National Intelligence Officers. Hopefully they can fulfill those missions with less than 600 people.
I would avoid ODNI and NCTC like a plague these days. Look at the people running them now and how they are haphazardly cutting positions like crazy. The head of NCTC even tried to get analysts to rewrite IC products so that Trump could deport ppl from certain countries. On the clearance side, CIA holds the clearances for those agencies.