Your points about it being only 24 individuals are fair. But even 2 million individuals is not "a large chunk of the US population" -- being less than 1% -- an

Your points about it being only 24 individuals are fair. But even 2 million individuals is not "a large chunk of the US population" -- being less than 1% -- and that's assuming that all employees of the US DoD need to maintain a valid security clearance (which I'll just grant you for the sake of argument, although it seems unlikely to me).