Officials say federal employee background check system overhaul is finally on the right track

Modernization of the federal employee background check system has been marked by costly, years-long delays; however, new leadership at the agency tasked with the overhaul said they have made progress over the last few months. 

Workers in national security-sensitive positions are now fully enrolled in continuous vetting, which involves automated reviews of a person’s background to ensure they still 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,” said David Cattler, the director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, at a press roundtable 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.”

DCSA is targeting fiscal 2028 for completely transitioning 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 transitioned to its electronic application for initiating 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. DCSA has aligned more than 100 additional positions to support NBIS with a focus on hiring individuals with engineering, architecture and cybersecurity skills, according to agency spokesperson Royal T. Reff. 

“We have hired a lot of new people — the right people to have in the seat in order to get the work done,” Cattler said. 

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 determined in 2023 was unreliable schedules and cost estimate planning. 

The director doesn’t expect the presidential transition to impact Trusted Workforce 2.0 implementation, 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 requested the GAO to review DCSA’s revised plans for NBIS and CV enrollment. 

While the bipartisan duo wrote that they appreciate the new agency leadership’s “commitment to better practices,” they are concerned about contractor performance and that national security personnel aren’t undergoing all required background checks.