December 11, 2008 

Security Clearances at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory-California

Department of Energy facilities, including those managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), use a fonllal security clearance process to authorize einployees with a "need to know" to access classified information or special nuclear material. The NNSA Service Center (Service Center) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is the cognizant authority for NNSA persoimel security clearances. ~II fiscal year 2007, the Service Center spent about $21 mi!lion to process approxiinately 52,000 persoimel security clearances for NNSA facilities. This included Lawrence Livennore National Laboratory (Livermore) and Sandia National Laboratory-California (Sandia), where about 9,200 individuals held clearances and approximately $3.6 million of the $21 million was expended. During this same period, the Service Center had a backlog of over 2,500 personnel security clearance requests that it was unable to process.

Topic: National Security and Safety