The duty of keeping secrets in the U.S. government does not belong to a small cadre of officials or military leaders. Rather, more than 4.2 million people have security clearances for access to classified information—a figure that’s far larger than what watchdogs had ever guessed. Of the total, 1,419,051 have top secret security clearance, including 524,990 contractors.
The number of security-clearance holders—who could practically fill up Washington, DC, by themselves—caught security experts off-guard. Steven Aftergood of the
Federation of American Scientists said the total is an “astonishingly large figure” and “another reminder of how quickly the national security bureaucracy has expanded over the past decade.”
The vast majority of clearance holders are federal employees or members of the U.S. military. But more than one million contractors also have access to classified information.
-Noel Brinkerhoff