As my colleague Nicole Ogrysko reported last week, the average time for the government to process security clearances grew steadily throughout fiscal 2015. For the subset of clearance seekers working under government contracts, things just got quite a bit worse.

Over the past month, an important piece of the clearance apparatus quietly ground to a near halt. Beginning on Dec. 8, the Defense Security Service all but ceased its processing of personnel security investigation requests for government contractors, and by the time things were up and running again on Jan. 5, a  new backlog of approximately 10,000 cases had built up.

The issue, according to DSS, is the budget gridlock the federal government faced at the end of last year. The stopgap continuing resolution, which funded agencies through the first quarter of fiscal 2016, provided less money than the agency needed to keep up with its workload at that point in the year, and by the beginning of December, the account the agency uses to fund industry background investigations when it approves and forwards them to the Office of Personnel Management was nearly dry.

(more…)

The Air Force’s secretary and chief of staff have made plain on many recent occasions that a decade of budget pressures have taken an excessive toll on the size of the service’s uniformed force and that some growth is now in order.

But the Air Force’s bosses’ views are exactly the opposite when it comes to the civilian workforce. Even after several recent rounds of voluntary early retirement initiatives and a headquarters restructuring that the service said had trimmed its management layers, the Air Force said last week that it has about 1,000 civilian “overages” across all of its major commands, and needs to use reduction in force (RIF) authorities to eliminate those positions.

The reductions will be carried out between now and April, officials said.

However, cutting 1,000 positions won’t mean laying off 1,000 people. The Air Force says it’s mainly using the RIF authority because it’s the only way to move civilians from the positions it intends to cut to other jobs that will continue to exist. Officials said they intended to find new positions for “most” of the affected workers.

(more…)

We like to call attention to significant departures or additions to government service in this space. There were several of them over the past week:

• Dave Bowen, the chief information officer at the Defense Health Agency, marked the New Year by retiring from government service. He was in on the ground floor of DoD’s newest combat support agency and tackled one of the hardest tasks a government CIO can take on: cobbling together a new organization from the IT functions of several different organizations. Before becoming DHA’s first-ever CIO, Bowen led IT operations for its predecessor organization, the Military Health System. Prior to coming to DoD a decade ago, he served as the Federal Aviation Administration’s CIO.

• Rob Nabors, the chief of staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is leaving government as well. He’s accepted a new job at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he’ll serve as director of governmental and policy affairs. Nabors has worked on Capitol Hill and at the Office of Management and Budget in several positions dating back to the Clinton administration. More recently, he was the deputy OMB director for budget, and led the White House’s supervision of the VA patient wait time scandal before he became the right-hand man to new VA Secretary Robert McDonald in April.

• Stan Sims, the director of the Defense Security Service, departed his post in a retirement ceremony at the agency’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, last Thursday. Sims is a retired Army colonel who previously served as the director for security within the office of the undersecretary of Defense for intelligence. DoD has not named a successor, and for now, Jim Kren, DSS’ deputy director, will lead the agency as its acting director.

The whole point of our Inside the Reporter’s Notebook features — both the DoD version you’re reading now and the more expansive and governmentwide edition curated by my esteemed colleague Jason Miller — is to highlight news tidbits that might not otherwise appear on our homepage or be covered in any media.

We started the “notebook” feature as a way to compile odds and ends of news that would otherwise slip through the cracks in our daily coverage of any given week’s events, and it’s been interesting and gratifying to see how much attention the notebook has gotten.

Many of this year’s items came directly from the readers and listeners who work and live in the areas we cover ever day. Thanks to all of you, and please continue your contributions via email to me and to Jason.

Here are the 10 DoD Reporter’s Notebook postings that garnered the most interest among our readers during 2015, as measured by how many people clicked on a given “notebook” posting on our website or via our email subscription service:

1. 2015 a ‘pivotal year’ on path to clean DoD audit, which is also quite expensive
2. Key piece of Pentagon’s insider threat program coming online
3. Navy Yard whistleblowers warned of security gaps
4. RAND analysis finds Army downsizing plan inadequate for current defense commitments
5. Army tells commanders to move out of and mothball older facilities
6. Work orders new effort to cut Pentagon’s administrative layers, reassess service contracts
7. DoD declassifies its long-awaited joint doctrine for cyberspace operations
8. Pentagon readies standup of regional cyber defense commands
9. Pentagon dipping its toe into BYOD
10. Pentagon seeks to speed up its investigations of official misconduct

The Defense Department has an understandable preoccupation with the cybersecurity practices of its vendors, especially since a preponderance of the successful cyber thefts of Defense information involve private IT systems, not government ones.

But small business advocates inside the department are concerned about a new set of requirements DoD imposed on a huge number of IT contractors beginning in October.

The office of Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy (DPAP) issued a class deviation — an emergency workaround to the usual process of writing acquisition rules — ordering all of DoD’s contracting officers to insert new language into their contracts requiring, among other things, multifactor authentication on any contractor-owned system that houses unclassified but “controlled” Defense information and quick notification to DoD when any of those systems appear to have been breached. (more…)

The fight about whether a civilian or contractor should fill a particular government job is a long-running one that probably will never die. But in a new report, the Congressional Budget Office raised a question that’s not asked quite as often: do we have too many uniformed military personnel performing office work?

CBO seems to think so. The office estimated that DoD has 340,000 military members assigned to “commercial” or support jobs. Converting just 80,000 of those into civilian positions would trim DoD’s personnel costs by anywhere between $3.1 billion and $5.7 billion per year, analysts concluded.

CBO is almost universally respected as fiercely nonpartisan for its expertise on fiscal matters — not necessarily for achieving the most effective personnel policies. But it definitely has a point when it concludes that military personnel are a lot more expensive to employ in the types positions where a civilian could do the work. Counting veterans benefits, health care, pensions, education and ancillary benefits like commissaries, the average military member costs the federal budget $135,000 per year compared to $96,000 for the average civilian. Also, a smaller number of civilians could replace existing military members in non-combat jobs. (more…)

By way of three exhaustive internal and external investigations, it’s already been well documented that the Washington Navy Yard had serious physical and other security weaknesses prior to the mass shooting there in Sept. 2013. But a newly-disclosed report makes clear that security managers on the base had tried to point out at least some of the deficiencies well in advance of the shootings.

The findings are part of a Naval Inspector General investigation launched just days after the shooting in response to earlier whistleblower complaints to the Office of Special Counsel. The whistleblowers — Sparky Edwards and Vernon Londagin — were the command security manager (CSM) and deputy CSM for the Navy’s office of Strategic Systems Programs, the organization in charge of acquiring and securing all of Navy’s nuclear weapons.

Most of their complaints had to do with specific security problems at SSP, whose headquarters is at the Navy Yard. But some related to weaknesses in the overall base’s security perimeter, including the allegation that contracted gate guards were letting anyone with a valid driver’s license drive onto the installation without any further screening, instead of requiring military ID. Edwards and Longadin said they complained to Navy Yard security officials that the practice was unsafe and complicated their efforts to build a “layered defense” for SSP, but were told that the policy was necessary so that visitors could easily access a credit union and historical museum on Navy Yard property. (more…)

The Navy and Marine Corps are still in the early planning stages of a potential revamp of their Next Generation Enterprise Network contract. But both services say they hope to use the recompetition of NGEN to give commercial industry more of a hand in the IT services they’re providing to sailors and Marines.

The Navy department released its request for information just a month ago – an early step in developing the acquisition strategy which could finally allow 34 different enterprise services to be competitively bid to different vendors, one of the key selling points all along of retaking government ownership of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet after a decade of full-outsourcing to HP. (That firm still handles day-to-day operation of Navy’s networks under the NGEN contract’s first round, but with much more say-so from the government customers who now own the infrastructure).

Among the Navy’s long-term objectives, according to deputy CIO Janice Haith, is to migrate at least 75 percent of its data from government-controlled data centers to commercially-operated cloud platforms. (more…)

The Defense Department is spending tens of millions of dollars per year to clean up after cybersecurity breaches – about 80 percent of which are caused by defensive lapses like poor user behavior and failure to apply software patches. So Pentagon leaders say it’s time to ratchet up the pressure on senior leaders to comply with existing security policies and better train their personnel on cyber hygiene.

The DoD Cybersecurity Culture and Compliance Initiative (DC3I) – billed as an effort to “transform DoD cybersecurity culture” – will include a new regime of no-notice inspections, mandates for commanders to incorporate real-world cyber scenarios into all of their unit training and a yet-to-be-determined amount of spending to make military networks more defensible, based on the premise that every dollar spent on up-front security prevents $7 of costs in fixing a breach after the fact.

A memo signed end of September by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey gives U.S. Cyber Command and the DoD Chief Information Officer 120 days to complete a series of 11 tasks to lay the groundwork for the initiative, beginning with training for senior leaders and for users, with an emphasis on showing them real-world things that can go wrong when cyber policies aren’t heeded. (more…)

With the odds dim that Congress will allow the Army to shrink its footprint of bases in line with its shrinking force, the service is implementing one of the few alternatives it has to a base realignment and closure (BRAC) round: moving soldiers and civilians out of its oldest buildings and shuttering them.

Lt. Gen. David Halverson, the commander of Army Installation Management Command has just signed an execution order telling base commanders to consolidate their personnel into the newest buildings they have and do everything they can to clear out of older, half-empty facilities. The measures are being undertaken mostly to save scarce maintenance dollars, partially because older buildings tend to be more costly to run. Some, officials said, will be placed in a long-term mothball status, others will be tagged for eventual demolition.

“But it takes money to do demolition, and that’s part of our challenge,” Katherine Hammack, the assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and the environment told reporters last week. “We don’t want to demo something that’s still in functional condition, we want to demo the failing structures. But when you have reduced funding you can’t even do that, so you’re going to have abandoned buildings that are of no use to anyone that are still standing up.” (more…)