The Office of Personnel Management on Tuesday handed off its National Background Investigations Bureau to the Defense Department, leaving the Pentagon in charge of conducting the vast majority of government’s security clearance investigations.
At midnight, NBIB officially ceased to exist, and its operations and more than 2,900 employees were subsumed by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. The agency, formerly known as the Defense Security Service, is now charged with adjudicating roughly 95% of the background investigations for the federal government.
DCSA also will be responsible for ensuring the Pentagon and its contractors don’t allow compromised technology to enter their IT ecosystems. Federal officials have grown increasingly wary of efforts by China and other adversaries to infiltrate the government through its IT supply chain, though even when threats arise, the Pentagon has historically been slow to act.
''This merger advances national defense strategy objectives to enhance our security environment and maintain lethality by protecting critical defense information from theft or disclosure,” Joseph Kernan, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said in a statement.
NBIB was created in the wake of the 2015 OPM breach that exposed the sensitive personal information of more than 21 million current and prospective federal employees and contractors. During its brief life, the bureau drew sharp criticism as the backlog of security clearance investigations soared, topping 725,000 in early 2018.
Congress passed language in the 2018 defense authorization bill requiring the Pentagon to conduct its own clearances, which made up about 70% of all investigations, and in April, the Trump administration signed pentagon officially taken security clearance process
