The last several months have seen progress in the over-budget, years-delayed effort to overhaul the federal-employee background-check system, officials with the lead agency say.
Workers in national security-sensitive positions are now fully enrolled in continuous vetting—that is, automated reviews of a person’s actions to ensure they meet security requirements.
“We successfully enrolled roughly four million clearance holders in those CV services. And I do think that’s a good-news story in itself. It’s a good news story because of the scale,” David Cattler, the director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, told reporters on Dec. 18. “That’s also a good-news story because it demonstrates some of the cost avoidance that we could get when we use the authorities that have been granted to the interagency, including DOD, by the president through Trusted Workforce 2.0.”
The agency is now focused on enrolling employees in non-sensitive public trust positions, which would add an estimated 1 million more federal workers to CV.
“As of Dec. 12, 23 federal agencies have completed the onboarding process. We currently have 26,540 enrollments into CV,” Cattler said. “The goal remains for full enrollment of the [non-sensitive public trust] population into the CV before the end of this fiscal year. I’m confident we’re positioned to do that.”
By fiscal 2028, DCSA wants to finish moving relevant federal employees to CV under Trusted Workforce 2.0.
On Dec. 18, the Office of Personnel Management published a final rule for enrolling certain federal employees and contractors into CV. Also in December, DCSA announced that all agencies that were required had switched to its electronic application for beginning background investigations, a process that began in March 2023.
The Defense Department in November approved DCSA’s three-year plan to implement the National Background Check Investigation Services system, which is the IT system that will undergird Trusted Workforce 2.0.
Cattler, who assumed his position in March, attributed the program’s recent progress partly to bringing on new people. “We have hired a lot of new people — the right people to have in the seat in order to get the work done,” he said.
DCSA has altered more than 100 job descriptions to support NBIS and aims to hire people with engineering, architecture and cybersecurity skills, according to agency spokesperson Royal Reff.
DOD started work on NBIS in late 2016 and had planned for it to be fully operational by 2019, but has had to repeatedly push that date back generally due to what the Government Accountability Office said last year was unreliable schedules and cost estimate planning.
The director doesn’t expect the presidential transition to affect the implementation of Trusted Workforce 2.0, noting the initiative largely originated in Trump’s first administration.
“We will, of course, adjust to what the president directs, but the plan I’m taking into the transition is the plan we’re executing,” he said.
Reps. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., the chairman and ranking member of the Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Subcommittee, on Dec. 13 asked the GAO to review DCSA’s revised plans for NBIS and CV enrollment.
The bipartisan duo wrote that they appreciate the new agency leaders’ “commitment to better practices,” but they are concerned about contractor performance and that national-security personnel aren’t undergoing all required background checks.
