mr. phalen's organization led by mr. paine. and chair and vice chair may recall, we met and briefed on this about 11 months ago internally. and we have been moving out steadily. last august, secretary mattis approved our plan, which was referred to as the section 951 plan tasked us to in the 2017 authorization act to submit a plan for this transition. and this past december upon approval of the national defense authorization act for 2018, this included direction to the defense department to implement the transition plan we submitted under the previous tasking and to do so by october of 2020. we are well under way to meet this objective. in fact, can project today that the initial phase of the plan, and there is some dependencies i'll talk about, but begin implementing this plan later in this year, october time frame, concurrent with the next fiscal year and there are some conditions i'll talk about. our team we all working very hard every day to put the resources and the procedures in place to make this happen. and mr. pain wil

mr. phalen and mr. reid, are there adequate resources in terms of people. is this just management and automation or are there shortfalls in terms of the number of people necessary to do these-- to work down this backlog? >> the current process and operation we operate in a working capital fund, revolving fund and agencies that wish to have an investigation done give us the money to have that investigation done, so from our standpoint it's here's the money, do the investigation so we are not short of the funding to on our end. the better question would be are the agencies that need investigations conducted funded appropriately to identified the monies they send to us to do the investigation. >> are there sufficient personnel? our economy is pretty tight. is there a shortage of qualified people to do this were? >> the high end of folks to do the investigative work as a population is a stressed at this point to hit beyond although we have encouraged suppliers and ourselves to continue hiring, but today there are nearly adequate, but we still have more work to

mr. phalen, you walked in when not many people would do this. [laughter] you have performed as well as one can do. that is faced with you -- losing 80% of your business down the road. mr. dunbar, i'm not sure you knew you signed up for this when the director asked you to come important.s is here ande chatted up other members have gotten the opportunity to question you, we are confident this might be a model we are beginning to see , and thean replicate energy between you and mr. phalen, that exchange is going to happen, and there's a director -- an opportunity for you and director codes to coalesce the rest of government towards this model. the one word that didn't come up in the second panel was reciprocity. either onehing that of you are doing on both ends. where it solves the problem of reciprocity either within an agency or between agencies. we had an officer that got the security clearance at the state department, but for us, the that theyrtment said don't have accreditation with the cia. so she had to physically go pick up her paperwork and

mr. phalen and mr. reid and mr. payne. the floor is yours. >> thank you, chairman burr, vice chairman warner and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss security clearances, challenges and reforms. the director of national intelligence designated as the security executive and in this role the dni is responsible for the development, implementation and oversight of effective, efficient, and uniform policies and procedures governing the conduct of investigations and adjudications and, if applicable, polygraph for eligibility for access to classified information. the national counterintelligence and security center has been designated as the lead support element to fulfill the dni's responsibilities. we are responsible for the oversight of policies governing the conduct of investigations and adjudications for approximately 4 million national security cleared personnel. the security clearance process includes determining if an individual is suitable to receive a security cle