The number of federal employees and contractors with security clearances dropped by nearly 6 percent in fiscal 2015 as adjudicators made better use of data, according to a new report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
About 4.25 million employees and contractors had clearances as of the end of fiscal 2015 — 265,523 less than the previous year, the ODNI report states. Those figures include everyone who was eligible to access classified information, whether or not they accessed it.
Most of the drop in clearances came because of the Defense Department’s implementation of data quality initiatives that included syncing disparate personnel databases, according to ODNI.
