Candidate-centric vetting: A new era of mobility

With policy change in place and new oversight over the National Background Investigation Services, it’s time for the government’s Trusted Workforce 2.0 program to pivot to efforts that will truly impact and affect the most critical piece of the Trusted Workforce: the Trusted Worker. 

While the government has changed dozens of policies over the past several years of its Trusted Workforce reform effort, unless you’re a government policy expert or C-suite security executive, you’re unlikely to have read or even truly tracked those reform efforts. But as Trusted Workforce 2.0 begins to meet its significant milestones, as tracked in the quarterly updates released by the Performance Accountability Council Program Management Office), in the next stage of government reform it's crucial for every worker across government, regardless of their role, to be aware of these changes. 

At the heart of Trusted Workforce is a move to change personnel vetting from a simple "in or out" scenario and to think of the Trusted Workforce beyond the world of clearance eligibility. The reality is that the Trusted Workforce involves millions more individuals than just the security cleared population, and individuals who serve the government. Over the next year, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency will enroll the Non-Sensitive Public Trust Population into Continuous Vetting. To date, CV has been the biggest change in the security reform process, changing every 5-to-10-year episodic reinvestigations to ongoing, continuous vetting for more comprehensive risk management and mitigation. 

The goal of this enrollment is twofold: It will help the government better track its public trust workforce and help with clearance mobility and transfer of trust—one of five vetting scenarios spelled out in Trusted Workforce.

Workforce issues aren’t just overhead functions – they are mission-critical efforts that cost the government time and money. A 2019 report by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance noted that issues and delays in reciprocity and adjudication could be costing the government 90,000 lost contractor labor years valued at more than $8 billion. DCSA has made strides in improving security clearance reciprocity into its workforce, but those aims across the broader suitability and security community have not been as noteworthy.

But that’s where the enrollment of the NSPT population into CV and new oversight into making progress under the government’s five new vetting scenarios can make a fundamental difference in how the federal workforce operates, and enable a truly candidate-centric vetting process. 

With policies in place and a renewed commitment to technological progress, personnel vetting is shifting focus to its five new vetting scenarios:

1. Initial vetting: Moving “outsiders to insiders.”
2. Continuous vetting: The most significant transformation of Trusted Workforce 2.0. Continuous vetting allows risks to be identified when they happen, not on a 5-or-10-year investigation timeline.
3. Upgrade in trust: New vetting that allows an individual to access information or facilities at a higher security or sensitivity level. 
4. Transfer of trust: Typically referred to as reciprocity, transfer of trust reform includes overhauling how individuals transfer in, out of, and between trusted positions. Enabled by CV, transfer of trust could create workforce mobility and significant resource savings. 
5. Reestablishment of trust: The government has realized that not everyone spends an entire career in the same agency or even in the same industry. Reestablishment of trust aims to make moving back into the federal and trusted workforce more seamless. 

This is policy in practice. Placing new emphasis on executing each vetting scenario, improving workforce mobility will be a natural consequence. Unlike today’s scenario, where workers who have suitability at GSA may wait months to onboard at DHS, or workers at DHS may wait months to even transfer positions to a different component of the same agency, the improved tracking of suitability determinations should lead to true reciprocity and transfer of trust.

Those interested in improving the security and mobility of the federal workforce will need to continue to follow the government’s progress on putting these five vetting scenarios in place. This is a better policy that creates better processes across the Trusted Workforce and a critical step forward in clearance reform.

Brett Mencin is the Vice President of Xcelerate Solutions, overseeing the performance and growth of the Enterprise Vetting & Analysis portfolio, which supports DHS, DOD, and FBI. With more than 15 years of experience in enterprise vetting and analysis, his extensive knowledge and dedication to enhancing Trusted Workforce 2.0 make him a highly sought-after and passionate resource for driving change and improvement.