Summer Myatt
Today, the United States federal government is undergoing a massive effort to reform the personnel security process and create a single vetting system that can serve the entire public sector.
Work to advance that initiative, called Trusted Workforce 2.0, is underway at the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, and in a new video interview, DCSA Director William Lietzau spoke about how his agency is supporting these modernization efforts.
For Lietzau, a 2023 Wash100 Award winner, Trusted Workforce 2.0 is “changing the way we do clearances to be faster, to identify the most important things earlier on and then to get people into a continuous vetting program so that we can look at the different scenarios of an initial investigation, an increase or decrease of what clearance somebody has and reestablishing trust if they’ve left government or left a cleared area.”
“We’re at the center of that,” Lietzau told Executive Mosaic’s Summer Myatt.
To support Trusted Workforce 2.0, DCSA is working to build what Lietzau called the largest information technology platform the government has likely ever produced — the National Background Investigation Services platform known as NBIS.
“It was designed to replace the system that had been hacked into by an adversary a few years back,” Lietzau explained. “We’re not just replacing that system, we’re replacing it with a system that takes us from beginning to end of a clearance process — initiating and saying, ‘This person needs a clearance,’ to granting them that clearance and tracking that they continue to have it in every continuously evaluated event that causes us to reconsider it.”
“All of that’s taking place in this platform we call NBIS, and building that platform for the entire government to use is part of that transformation process and one of our strategic goals to improve how we’re doing business,” said Lietzau.
Learn more about DCSA’s work to modernize the personnel vetting process — watch William Lietzau’s full video interview here.
