Upgrade Adjudication > 5 months

Background: Arrested twice in 2013 (drinking ticket, marijuana, I was in high school and a dumbass). Graduated college in 2018 (engineering) at a “top school,” and started working for a defense contractor. I got a full secret clearance in about 14 months, adjudicated everything with my past. Took a new job internal to my company, requires a TS. Got put in February this year, got an interim TS in about a week or so. Investigation finished in May. Couple months went by, still didn’t hear anything. My company sent a CSR in at the end of June. Government replied with “your investigation has been forwarded to the DoDCAF for adjudication.” It’s been 3 months since the CSR, around 5 total since the investigation closed. I’m kind of confused as to why adjudication is taking so long. Everything on there has already been adjudicated once, and (maybe I’m naive), how in the world does is take so long to adjudicate my case? Even if I were to get denied a clearance, why would they need so much time to decide this?

My understanding is the adjudicators review stuff found during the investigation. Why does this take half a year to review? Should I be worried that its taking this long?

Adjudicators work on their own timeline and they get to it when they get to it. Your local US congressman may be able to make some inquiries for you and/or get you to the top of the pile of many many investigations that need adjudicating. Good luck.

I am one of these nuts who believes that the complicated cases get pushed to the bottom of the pile and they work through the simpler cases first to keep their numbers up.

Possibly they have some requests for additional information which may take additional time to work through the system.

Unfortunately five months isn’t that long at all… adjudication has been known to take much longer.

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Yeah if they can quickly approve a boatload they do. The ones requiring deep dives are slow. The standard for TS is the same for Secret in theory anyway. If you were completely honest and there wasn’t info you fudged on…18 to 24 months isn’t unusual.