DCSA expands continuous vetting to more than one million public trust positions

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency is expanding its continuous vetting system as part of the Trusted Workforce 2.0 initiative, reports Federal News Network. This expansion includes approximately one million federal employees and contractors in public trust positions, such as police officers, nurses, and custodial staff in sensitive locations, as well as government contractors. Continuous vetting replaces the outdated practice of conducting reinvestigations every five to ten years, thereby offering real-time threat analysis and monitoring of "high value" data sources.

The article urges those with blemished pasts to take comfort: “Some aspects of the implementation—including requirements for employees to self-report potentially derogatory information about themselves—will vary agency-by-agency. But whether it’s self-reported or detected by DCSA’s monitoring tools, a potentially negative life event won’t necessarily have immediate employment consequences.”

DCSA began rolling out the system in August with select agencies and plans a phased enrollment to all nonsensitive public trust populations by the end of fiscal year 2025. Agencies are advised to execute agreements with DCSA to enroll their populations be prepared to pay for the service. The article reports that as recently as 2018, Secret clearances took 200 days to adjudicate and Top Secret more than 400 days. “Under new governmentwide goals set last year, the vetting process is supposed to take 40 days for secret clearances, 75 days for top secret, and 25 days for public trust positions.” DCSA could not predict specific figures.