Continuous Vetting for Public Trust Workers Adds to Personnel Security Workloads

With the announcement by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that as a part of the Trusted Workforce 2.0 initiative, all Non-Sensitive Public Trust (NS-PT) employees and contractors will be enrolled in Continuous Vetting (CV), the workload for personnel security folks reviewing the alerts will quadruple. The National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) system used for processing all these alerts for the Department of Defense (DoD) is not fully functional to be able to support CV for the entire Federal government, meaning many non-DoD agencies are having to figure out how to implement CV using their own systems that must be able to integrate with OPM legacy systems.

This is a massive lift for the various non-DoD Personnel Security Programs and although is meant to alleviate periodic reinvestigations in the long run, it will initially be a very painful transition with personnel security staff shortages, new training requirements, system integration incompatibilities, and limited data storage capacities. As a result, manual enrollment and unenrollment processes may have to be used. Additionally, self-reporting requirements will need to be established and a mechanism developed to process them. To throw some more fuel on the fire, after all agencies have enrolled their NS-PT population into CV by the end of FY 2025, then OPM and ODNI plan on having agencies enroll all of their non-sensitive low risk workers by sometime in FY 2026.