How Secrecy Limits Diversity
The Security-Clearance Process Keeps Many Qualified People Out of America’s National Security Workforce
By Matthew Connelly and Patricia Irvin
In December 2022, the Department of Energy announced that it was righting a historic wrong. After an unprecedented reexamination of a decades-old case, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm decided to void the 1954 revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The case of Oppenheimer, the famous nuclear physicist, sheds light on how the United States decides who can be trusted with access to classified information. The clearance process ultimately determines who has the knowledge and the power to play a role in defending the United States against all threats, foreign and domestic.
Oppenheimer’s revocation, Granholm announced, resulted from “the bias and unfairness of the process.” Despite being known as the “father of the atom bomb” for his crucial work developing the weapon, Oppenheimer rankled officials by opposing high-level decisions on thermonuclear weapons and the postwar world order. He was also the son of German Jewish immigrants, with friends and relatives who had politically progressive views—several were communists—at a time when many Americans treated Jews as intrinsically foreign and untrustworthy. The hearing board that decided Oppenheimer’s fate was made up of three men. Before the case was even presented, one of those men, Ward Evans, made his views clear when he declared that “almost without exception those who turned up before security review boards with subversive backgrounds and interests were Jewish.”
Exonerating Oppenheimer is hardly the end of the story, however. The security clearance process and other systems that determine who can access classified information—starting with who gets offered sensitive positions—have excluded countless other Americans, typically with little or no explanation or redress. In fact, Oppenheimer had far more advantages than others who have come under this kind of scrutiny. After all, Oppenheimer’s family was wealthy, and he was well connected. Since details about the stripping or denial of security clearances in individual cases are typically unavailable, there is no way to determine with real precision how many such cases have, over decades, shaped the composition of the foreign policymaking and national security community. But the limited information that is available suggests that people from marginalized groups in the United States have consistently had greater difficulty obtaining and retaining clearances than others. Along with clear disparities (and discrimination) in hiring and promotion, this is an important factor in explaining why people from these groups are less likely to hold national security positions—both relative to their representation in society at large and relative to representation in government jobs that do not require such clearances. This is especially true of the most senior positions where higher levels of security clearances are required.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-secrecy-limits-diversity
