How many people have Q Clearance? (2024)

The Q Clearance is the enigmatically-named security clearance created to allow access Restricted Data, the legal category for nuclear secrets in the United States (after which my book is named). It is issued by the the US Department of Energy, and requires a single-scope background investigation (originally by the FBI), with the same requirements as a Top Secret clearance, and keeping it requires being re-investigated every 5 years.

So how many people currently have Q clearances? Someone asked me this a year ago and I realized that not only did I not know, but I didn’t really have a great way to even estimate it. So I did the natural thing and filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Energy and asked them.

And today, they got back to me with this simple table:

April 2018 – 87,113

April 2019 – 90,454

April 2020 – 98,103

April 2021 – 92,177

Which is somewhat interesting. First, I guess that’s more than I would have guessed, but again, I didn’t have a great place to start for guessing. I knew, from Dana Priest and William Arkin’sTop Secret America that a decade ago, 850,000 Americans had a Top Secret clearance — a remarkable number. As of 2019, that’s up to 1.25 million.¹ That Q clearances would be about 10% of that seems reasonable once I consider it, but if you had told me it was 5%, or 15%, I also might have thought that was reasonable, too, in the absence of information.

Second, there’s an interesting amount of fluctuation there. From 2018 to 2019, it grew by 3,341 people, but then the next year it grew by 7,649 people, but then it dropped by almost 6,000 people. That strikes me as a pretty impressive amount of variance. A nearly 10% gain, followed by a 6% loss. But again, I don’t have any more data than this tiny snapshot, so it is hard to say more about it.

Anyway, I thought people would be interested (and wanted to have an “answer” out there in case anyone else Googled this question in the future).

The most amusing thing about the Q Clearance, as an aside, is that while its name sounds so enigmatic and mysterious, its actual origins are aggressively mundane. During the latter part of the Manhattan Project, they created a new form called the Personnel Security Questionnaire that would be the basis of their background checks. When the Atomic Energy Commission took over administration of the US nuclear complex, they inherited the same form. In figuring out early clearance levels, they decided that maybe they ought to just call them P, S, and Q, after the PSQ form.

“P” would be for people who didn’t need access to Restricted Data and had no access to it at all; “S” was for frequent visitors to AEC installations who didn’t need access to Restricted Data but still needed to be in places where it might be found; “Q” was for people who needed access to Restricted Data. So instead of being some shadowy name, its name is literally taken from a form. Like many secret matters, the reality is far less interesting once you get the full story.²

1. Thanks to Steve Aftergood at FAS for sending me this document! [↩]
2. The P designation is still used today (but not called P Clearance, because it is not a clearance, strictly speaking, but an “approval”). I suspect they retired S at some point because it is easy to confuse with someone who is cleared for Secret information. [↩]

Tags: 2010s, 2020s, Clearances, Department of Energy

This entry was postedon Friday, November 12th, 2021 at 2:41 pmand is filed under Redactions.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Citation: Alex Wellerstein, "How many people have Q Clearance?," Restricted Data: A Nuclear History Blog, November 12, 2021, accessed June 13, 2024, https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/11/12/how-many-people-have-q-clearance/.