One of President Donald Trump’s closest aides, Natalie Harp, worked in the White House for more than a year without completing the normal security clearance process, according to a recent MS Now report.

Harp may have been among the personnel granted interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information access at the beginning of Trump’s second term. Trump authorized such clearances in January 2025 for up to six months, allowing officials to begin work while the normal background investigations proceeded.

According to the MS Now report, however, Harp declined multiple times over more than a year to begin that process, submitting the required forms in recent months after concerns were raised inside the White House and Trump intervened. She has since been granted clearance.

The circumstances surrounding Harp are unusual, but the tension they expose is not. New presidential administrations need people in place immediately, but the government’s security-vetting system can take months to complete. Interim clearances are one way of reconciling those competing demands.

The difficulty comes when temporary access and the investigation that is supposed to follow it cease to move together. Understanding why that matters requires first looking at what the clearance process actually involves.

The clearance process

I’m an international affairs professor, and I’ve held executive roles in the CIA, National Counterterrorism Center and National Security Agency. Before I could be hired to begin my nearly 30 years in the U.S. intelligence community, I completed a lengthy questionnaire required for a high-level clearance and underwent an extensive background........

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