I wanted to confirm that significant debt can preclude someone from acquiring a security clearance. Significant new debt can be reason to rescind an active clearance too.

Bankruptcy & poor finances is the #1 reason for a clearance application to be rejected.

Shows a pattern of poor judgement, and makes the applicant way, way more likely to be bribed or blackmailed.

Bankruptcy also has a court angle, which means you can, with an amount of effort that's trivial for large, nation-state intelligence orgs, find a list of all recent bankruptcy cases in, say, Southern Maryland or Northern Virginia. The CI types lose a lot of sleep over this stuff.