The statutory bars
The absolute bar: current unlawful drug use
A federal agency may not grant or renew a clearance at any level for someone who currently uses a controlled substance unlawfully or is addicted to one. Marijuana counts regardless of state law, because the bar follows federal law. This bar is not waivable. It reaches current use only: past use is weighed like any other concern, under Guideline H, where the time since the last use matters and is measured on time since the conduct.
Three narrower bars, for the most sensitive access
Three more bars apply only to the most sensitive categories of access (Sensitive Compartmented Information, Special Access Programs, and Restricted Data), not to an ordinary Secret or Top Secret clearance:
- a conviction with imprisonment for more than one year,
- a dishonorable discharge, or
- a finding by a court or a board that the person is mentally incompetent.
Unlike the drug bar, each of these can be waived in meritorious cases. For contractor cases that waiver decision belongs to the Director of DOHA.
The predecessor: the Smith Amendment, 2000 to 2008
From 2000 to 2008 an earlier version of these bars, the Smith Amendment (10 U.S.C. 986), applied to Department of Defense cases only, and its reach was broader: its conviction bar reached ordinary clearances, not only the most sensitive programs. Congress replaced it in 2008 with the Bond Amendment, which extended the rules government-wide while narrowing the conviction, discharge, and incompetence bars to the most sensitive access. Older decisions in the record apply the Smith version, so the two names describe different eras of the same rule.
In the decided record
470 hearing-level cases in the record discuss one of the bars by name: 443 the Smith-era version and 45 the Bond Amendment. As a group they were resolved as follows.
· 55 granted of 470 decided
Far below the record overall, which is what you would expect of a group of cases in which a bar was worth discussing at all.
Everything else is weighed
Outside these bars, a judge weighs the conduct and the circumstances against the published conditions. Those are described in the 13 guidelines.
How these numbers are measured
The counts are taken from decided hearing-level industrial cases whose text names one of the bars. Naming a bar is not the same as being decided by it: some of these decisions weigh whether the bar applies and find that it does not. The counts update as new decisions are ingested. The substance above is a descriptive reference built from the public record and the published rules, and it is not legal advice.
Reading the statistics
- Granted = access granted or continued; Denied = denied or revoked.
- Grant rate = granted ÷ (granted + denied).
- † marks figures based on fewer than 20 cases, too few to be reliable.
- Hovering any rate shows its statistical range (a 95% confidence interval).
- Figures are descriptive counts over decided, public DOHA ISCR decisions, never predictions or assessments of any pending case.
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