Margarita Howard’s Veteran Pipeline Pays Off Now

Cleared technical talent is hard to find in defense contracting, and it is getting harder as the security clearance process itself slows down. A new clearance took an average of 243 days to process in fiscal year 2025. For a contractor that needs cleared engineers and technicians on short notice, that timeline is a real constraint. HX5, founded by Margarita Howard in 2004, built a pipeline meant to sidestep exactly that problem.

More than 30 percent of HX5’s roughly 1,000 employees are veterans, sourced in large part through the company’s participation in SkillBridge, a program that moves transitioning military personnel directly into civilian technical roles. Many arrive with clearances and military occupational specialties that map onto the defense program work HX5 performs for the Department of Defense and NASA. That effort earned HX5 a 2025 HIRE Vets Gold Medallion Award from the Department of Labor.

Why the Pipeline Matters Now

The timing lines up with a broader labor shortage. The construction and skilled trades sector was short 439,000 workers in 2025, a gap the federal government is competing against as it tries to rebuild its own civilian workforce after last year’s departures. Through a deferred resignation program, 61,600 civilian Department of Defense employees left, part of 348,219 departures across all federal agencies against only 116,912 new hires.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Dale Marks has told Senate committee members the department is preparing investments in partnerships with universities and trade schools to rebuild its skilled trades workforce, but that kind of pipeline takes years to produce results.

A Founder’s Read on Talent

Margarita Howard has framed the company’s speed in adapting to client needs as an advantage larger competitors rarely match. A sourcing strategy built around veterans transitioning out of service, many already cleared and already trained on relevant systems, is one concrete version of that advantage, arriving at a moment when the rest of the market is short on exactly that kind of talent. It also gives HX5 a hiring channel that does not depend on the slow federal clearance process at all, since many candidates bring an active clearance with them on day one.