How Trump’s security clearances order could make the U.S. vulnerable

President Donald Trump’s plan to grant temporary security clearances to anyone he chooses opens the door to breaches and even espionage, experts and former officials say.

What’s less clear is whether the dramatic move is part of Trump’s war on the “deep state,” which the president says undermined his first-term agenda — or simply an attempt to address his transition team’s delays in applying for clearances for those running the government’s national security infrastructure. The decision will hand the keys to the government’s most cherished secrets to whomever Trump desires.

Trump signed a memorandum on his first day to “resolve the backlog of security clearances,” denouncing a “broken” process that he said was making it impossible for the president’s appointees to start work inside the White House. The order bypasses standard investigations into whether officials might have issues that could compromise hard-won intelligence.

The memorandum grants an immediate top security clearance to a list of officials to be drawn up by the White House counsel for a period “not to exceed six months.” It did not specify the officials. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump administration officials have voiced frustration with what they say was foot-dragging by their predecessors to issue the clearances. But former officials familiar with the process say that other incoming administrations have solved similar challenges by sending officials through an accelerated investigation that can yield a temporary clearance within weeks, rather than skipping it entirely. They warned that handing out clearances without any background check was a major gamble.

“The risk of any kind of shortcut is that you can have somebody who's compromised, ethically, personally, financially or actually compromised by a hostile intelligence service,” said Daniel Fried, a retired career diplomat who advised presidents of both parties on national security issues.

“This isn’t a deep-state argument. It’s an argument based on Trump’s own principles of great-power rivalry. So if you take your own views seriously, you understand that there are hostile intelligence services, the Chinese, the Russians, others,” he said. “I’m not going to start screaming, but these are the kinds of safeguards that when you do without them, you can find out sometimes the hard way why they’re there.”

Security clearances can be rejected for a host of reasons. A personal entanglement — affairs, debts, addictions — could make an official vulnerable. Complex business interests might create a web of dependencies. Contacts with foreign citizens are scrutinized especially carefully to make sure that the person isn’t working on behalf of another nation to steal U.S. secrets.

Trump has blasted the “deep state” — or career government employees — for what he says were efforts to delay implementation of his policies in his first term. Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, has explored ways to strip tens of thousands of federal employees of their civil service job protections and replace them with political appointees who would be Trump loyalists.

The effort to bypass any standard security clearance process would also deprive career professionals of their power over Trump’s agenda. The memorandum directs the White House counsel to draw up a list of officials who will receive access to “sensitive compartmented information,” the most carefully guarded secrets the government possesses.

Part of the White House’s urgency may be the consequence of an effort to sweep career civil servants from Trump’s National Security Council, leaving an especially bare-bones operation until his political appointees can get the necessary clearances to access the classified computer systems and other technology that will allow them to do their jobs.

Security clearances became a major embarrassment in Trump’s first White House when his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had trouble obtaining one as his background investigation extended over a year amid his work as a senior adviser to the president. The specific security concerns were never detailed.

At one point, his interim clearance was downgraded to “secret,” a far more restricted level than the access granted by Monday’s memorandum.

Kushner’s clearance challenges ultimately became a political problem for the president, who overruled the process and directed that his son-in-law be granted permanent top-secret clearance. The decision made Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, deeply uncomfortable, The Washington Post reported at the time.

Two former Biden administration officials attributed the lack of security clearances to a number of delays from Trump transition officials. The Trump team initially did not sign a memorandum of understanding that included necessary paperwork to allow background checks to begin. And once that paperwork was signed, it took longer still for names to be submitted for the background investigations, the officials said.

“This seemed very, very delayed,” one of the former administration officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “The question I’d be asking is whether this executive order is really just a license to bypass the whole process. It allows the counsel’s office to just waive any requirement for a security clearance.”

In some cases, the names for security clearances were not submitted until late December, around Christmas, which didn’t allow enough time for the vetting and interviews that typically need to take place, the former administration officials said.

The process often requires extensive paperwork and interviews, which can take more time if an applicant has a significant number of foreign contacts who need to be interviewed. It can also take longer if the people who need to be interviewed take time to respond.

“It’s just how process works,” the former administration official said. “Normally, you’d want at least a few weeks, and that’s an expedited time schedule. But if you’re trying to do a whole bunch of background checks on a two-week schedule, that’s a lot to process.”

On Monday, Trump also stripped 50 former national security officials of their clearances. All but one of the officials signed a letter in the last months of the first Trump administration suggesting that the publication of emails from an abandoned laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The other official whose clearance was stripped, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, broke with the president late in his term and remained an outspoken critic, writing a book that condemned Trump’s judgment and called him a menace.

Trump has accused the intelligence community of colluding with the 2020 Biden campaign to discredit his administration and tie it to allegations of Russian influence.

Maintaining a security clearance enables former officials to do work for intelligence and defense contractors in the private sector that require them to have access to sensitive information.

At least some of the officials who were on the list say they no longer have clearance anyway, and some are retired.

• Matt Viser and Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.