Sponsors (2)
The bill increases transparency and oversight of security-clearance adjudications and can expose discriminatory patterns through disaggregated reporting, while creating privacy/security risks, administrative costs, and the potential for misleading conclusions if data are incomplete.
Federal employees, clearance applicants, government contractors, and Congressional overseers would gain detailed annual reporting (denials, suspensions, revocations, appeal volumes and success rates), increasing transparency and accountability in security-clearance adjudications and enabling better oversight of process fairness.
Federal employees and applicants from racial, national-origin, and gender minority groups would benefit from disaggregated data that can reveal disproportionate impacts and inform reforms to reduce discrimination in clearance decisions.
Individuals appealing adverse clearance decisions would benefit from public metrics on appeal volumes and success rates, giving them and oversight bodies better information to assess fairness and effectiveness of adjudication processes.
Federal employees and contractors could face privacy and security risks if disaggregated clearance data reveal sensitive personnel information about individuals.
The State Department will incur additional administrative costs and resource burdens to compile, review, and publish the detailed annual reports and demographic disaggregations, which may affect agency capacity and impose costs on taxpayers.
If demographic data are incomplete or inaccurate, the published reports could be misleading and provoke unwarranted conclusions about disparate treatment, undermining the reports' usefulness.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires annual reports to congressional foreign affairs committees on adverse Diplomatic Security clearance decisions, appeals, criteria, and demographic breakdowns.
Introduced June 25, 2025 by Ted Lieu · Last progress June 25, 2025
Requires the Secretary of State to send an annual report to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee describing adverse security-clearance decisions handled by the Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security. The report must count types of adverse outcomes, appeals (split by assignment restrictions vs. assignment reviews), appeal success rates, the criteria used for adverse decisions, and disaggregate counts by position and available demographic data (ethnicity/national origin/race and gender). The first report must cover January 1, 2024 through its submission; later reports cover the prior year.