The Pentagon and Office of Personnel Management are moving forward with plans to transfer background investigation services to Department of Defense control, but priorities for those services will remain the same.
The National Background Investigation Bureau's backlog is down over 20 percent from its April 2018 peak amid efforts to streamline and transfer the background investigation process to the Department of Defense.
More than 4 million federal and contract jobs require some level of security clearance and the National Background Investigations Bureau currently needs to process more than 710,000 applications.
Executive agencies are getting worse at processing background investigations in a timely manner, despite reform efforts, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.
The Department of Defense’s scheduled takeover of its security clearance investigations from the National Background Investigations Bureau may only add to the clearance backlog rather than alleviate it.
A government backlog of 700,000 security clearance reviews has led agencies like the Defense Department to inadvertently issue interim passes to criminals — even rapists and killers — prompting calls for better and faster vetting of people with access to the nation’s secrets.
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