In 2018, the government embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of the personnel vetting program, involving coordination across government. Trusted Workforce 2.0 aims to not just address systemic issues with the government’s process of vetting personnel, but to transform it. A key driver of that effort has been Matt Eanes, the Director of the Performance Accountability Council Program Management Office. Eanes has applied his experience as a consultant and executive in industry to help the government rethink how it delivers trusted workers to support critical national security functions. It has been a monolith change in both policy and process, an effort Eanes spoke at length about during a webinar hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and sponsored by SIMS Software.
“It’s a non-linear problem set dealing with the whole of government,” said Eanes. “The government is structured in verticals, and this is a horizontal that cuts across all of that.”
The opportunity to make an impact, built out of a strong sense of civic duty, has kept Eanes spearheading the security clearance reform effort for the past 7 years. He shared that the government vets around 400,000 new hires each year.
“If you speed up the process 5 days, you’re talking about giving back 2 million days to the mission,” he said. Improve it by 40 days, he added, and you’re giving back 16 million days to the mission, or approximately 44,000 years. “That’s a huge opportunity…to better support our national security.”
Personnel vetting can seem like a process or admin function, but Eanes emphasizes the significant mission impact – and why current reform efforts are so fundamental to not just improving security, but all of government.
Eanes credits his background outside of personnel vetting as an advantage in helping address a process that has been beleaguered by issues, including stints on and off the Government Accountability Office’s High-Risk List. Having a problem solving mindset has helped Eanes to consider what he calls the ‘adjacent possible’ – and how sectors outside of personnel vetting can improve the processes within it.
Trusted Workforce Progress Report
Continuous vetting remains the cornerstone effort of Trusted Workforce 2.0, and one ready to roll out to an even broader population in the year to come. CV has moved the government from episodic periodic reinvestigations to a continuous model of vetting trusted workers. It shifted the way the government manages its trusted workforce from the way it has been done for the past 70 years, within a matter of just a few years – which has included significant updates to both policy and process.
“Trusted Workforce is an effort, in its simplest form, to get trusted people to work faster,” said Eanes. “Not getting people to work faster, but getting trusted people to work faster,” he emphasized, noting that the new process fundamentally changes the philosophy around personnel vetting, where trusted insiders are now treated differently than outsiders. That shift in mindset changes other aspects of the security clearance process, including reciprocity and clearance upgrades. It’s both a better process, but also a ‘better lived experience for the workforce,’ added Eanes.
CV has improved process and efficiency, but also security – the marriage of better process and better security is fundamentally what Trusted Workforce enables.
To date this year the government has received 54,000 unreported CV alerts for the 4.4 million individuals currently enrolled. Previously the government wouldn’t have had that information for another 3-7 years at the point of their next periodic reinvestigation. And CV isn’t just better for the government’s security, but for the individual. Disqualifying incidents typically build over time. A single unreported incident could snowball into dozens over a period of years, and by the time the government was aware, mitigations would be too long gone and eligibility and employment would be lost. Early reporting allows for early interventions, including support through employee assistance programs, Eanes noted.
CV improves security, but it also improves mobility. Reciprocity and transfer of trust operate differently in the subscription-based CV-model, where individuals are able to transfer within trusted positions without the issue of an out of scope investigation, which often occurred as individuals were transitioning out of government or military service with a pending PR. CV also enables the government to create lanes of risk. Eanes describes it like the Dulles Toll Road, with different levels of friction – someone with more alerts should transition differently than someone with none. Through CV, the government is more easily able to identify which cases and individuals warrant additional screening in a transfer of trust scenario. And today, there is no longer a concept of out of scope for someone who stays affiliated with the government through CV.
Trusted Workforce For the Future
In the months to come, the transformational efforts of Trusted Workforce will continue, as the government continues enrollment of the high-risk public trust population into CV, adopts new IT enhancements, and works to get NBIS on track and address improvements to Scattered Castles, enrolls more personnel into the Rap-Back program, and looks to improve the operational environment.
“We have to do all of this transformation work, but we can’t break today while we do it,” said Eanes. Expect more iterative updates in the months to come, including looking at things like increased use of preliminary determinations – a success story for industry that could get rolled out into other populations to help onboarding – and eAdjudication, which can help clean cases get adjudicated on day one.
Another success story of today’s personnel vetting enhancements – the continued collaboration across stakeholders including the PAC PMO, ODNI, OPM, and DCSA. INSA’s Addressing Emerging Security Threats series will next offer a conversation with DCSA Director David Cattler on August 14.
“Thank you, SIMS Software, for sponsoring these important webinars,” said Charlie Phalen, former acting director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and head of the National Background Investigation Bureau (NBIB). “These sessions are critical to keeping the intelligence and national security community up to speed on the changes, and more importantly the progress, that has been made in the quality and efficiency of the trusted workforce vetting program. In particular, Matt Eanes has been a strong and sustained leader in the evolution of the program.”
