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This month's regular article in the Foreign Service Journal, by AFSA's State VP Daniel Hirsch, caught our eye:
Text:
The State Department’s Office of Medical Services has been working steadily to improve its handling of mental health issues, including workplace and trauma-induced stress disorders and substance abuse problems. AFSA has been kept apprised of new programs and improvements, and consulted as they are developed. We are very favorably impressed by both the quality and the intent behind these increasingly excellent programs and urge employees who feel they need help to seek it.
AFSA has been asked to help spread the word within the Foreign Service that using these programs will not affect employees’ security clearances. While we consider that the probable consequences of seeking needed treatment are better than those of not seeking it — and strongly recommend that those who need help take advantage of these outstanding programs — we cannot confidently assert that a security clearance will not be affected. Nobody can.
The governmentwide guidelines quoted in the Foreign Affairs Manual contain a unique mechanism that, used properly, should prevent an unreliable or improper factor from leading to a security clearance revocation. They require that mandatory questions be asked about every factor considered, that all available information be weighed and that information used in a decision is reliable and proper. However, AFSA continues to see and hear of cases indicating that this “whole person analysis” is not always conducted or is based on highly questionable information, including cases involving Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms and substance abuse.
For years, AFSA has recommended the adoption of basic management controls that would indicate whether “adverse action” decisions by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s clearance office complied with State’s own FAM regulations and governmentwide procedures. These controls could serve not only as reference tools for attorneys working on the cases of the employees involved, but would also allow the department — and AFSA — to certify that issues like PTSD treatment were not leading to clearance revocations. To our knowledge, such controls have not been implemented.
Without procedures in place to ensure compliance with regulations, adverse action security clearance adjudications are, for all intents and purposes, unregulated.
Currently, there is no mechanism in place to ensure that mental health treatment, or any other prohibited factor, will not improperly form the sole basis for a security clearance revocation at State.
In the absence of management controls to demonstrate compliance with its own rules and promises, the Department relies on the memory of the adjudicators, and points to a September 2006 Office of the Inspector General Review (ISP-I-06-43). That review looked only at closed files already massaged by lawyers and purged of notes, at theoretical timelines, and at whether or not rules were actually on the books. It ignored every lead provided by AFSA, and did not involve any of the procedures described by the basic governmentwide recommendations for quality control in security clearance cases.
An investigation into the conduct of that inspection by the President's Council on Integrity & Efficiency — which investigates claims of wrongdoing by inspectors general — ended with the untimely departure of the State Department inspector general who ordered it.
AFSA would like to see the following controls implemented:
• DS/PSS should use the same standard used by the Office of Personnel Management and other agencies to verify the reliability of information used in a clearance determination. That standard requires that any allegation be supported by at least one piece of evidence that a reasonable person would consider plausible, and that information which does not pass a “reasonable person test” not be used as the basis for a revocation.
• DS/PSS should use a form or template to demonstrate that the whole-person evaluation described above was performed. This would list the required questions, indicate which information in DS’s files was applied to those questions, and summarize the answer to each question.
Where an initial investigation did not obtain information needed to address all of the mandatory whole-person questions, additional investigation or interviews for the sole purpose of answering those questions should be performed.
Documenting a whole-person review would make the basis of any decision clearer and more verifiable.
• The FAM should include the Quality Control mechanisms described in government-wide directives and used by other agencies.
• There should be a clarification of procedures in the FAM, to make all involved understand that the purpose of the exercise is a fair and complete evaluation, not merely a successful adverse outcome.
All of these suggestions are based on governmentwide guidelines and are used by other agencies that conduct security clearance adjudications. Implementing them would go a long way towards enabling AFSA (or anyone) to say with certainty that rules are being followed, and whether employees who need help can get that help without fear of losing their livelihood.
End text.
CFSO would put it more simply: In the majority of cases we have seen, DS has performed no whole-person review at all. That failure to perform the most basic step in a security clearance adjudication violates federal laws and Department regulations. The reason DS refuses to put management controls into place is that those controls would prove routine violations of law by DS/PSS; which are, in turn, routinely rubber-stamped up the chain of command.
Like the OIG report cooked up between IG Cookie Krongard and former DS Assistant Secretary Richard Griffin - both of whom resigned in disgrace following numerous revelations of wrongdoing - these routine violations of law are performed in order to allow State to continue using this process as a back-door mechanism to fire - or harass into resignation - employees who cannot legally be fired by any other mechanism. By definition those are people who have committed no wrongdoing, and perform their work satisfactorally - but who somebody in power - or in DS - wants to see gone. This is a prohibited personnel practice, which internal controls and oversight would force State to abandon.
CFSO believes that part of the problem lies in the comparatively small size of DS/PSS, the office in question; and in the fact that, staffed as it is with CS employees, the turnover in that office is low. The small size means that a handful of people wield inordinate control, and the low turnover means that the bad habits instilled in that staff have become ingrained. It also reduces the willingness of DS/PSS staff members to refuse unlawful orders.
In larger operations, like that of OPM and DOD, size itself ensures greater objectivity. There are thousands of adjudicators, hundreds of supervisors, and the operation is performed independently of internal agency politics.
Moreover, greater diversity within DOD's and OPM's adjudicative staffs help overcome the bias that is exhibited all too frequently in DS/PSS cases. For this reason, we urge Congress to consider removing this authority from State, and transferring it to OPM - where it can be performed fairly and to a government-wide standard.
The two longest-running security clearance suspensions in the history of the U.S. Government (both well into their ninth years) are both current Department of State cases, as is a case generally considered to be among the most obvious examples of antisemitism in a recent security clearance matter.
Whatever nonsense DS spouts about improvements or integrity, those facts alone should give one pause.
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