Breakup of OPM Advances a Step

The Trump administration has advanced its planned breakup of OPM a step by finalizing the transfer of its background investigations unit to the Defense Department.

An executive order carries out the earlier-stated intention to have DoD take over by September 30 the responsibility for conducting security clearance-related investigations—both for initial clearances and for continued eligibility—and other background checks on federal and contractor employees for almost all agencies. The agencies are to spell out specific of the transition by late June.

Under an earlier-enacted law, DoD already was in the process of taking over responsibility for conducting checks on its own employees and contractors; the administration’s government reorganization plan announced a year ago advocated sending the rest to DoD as well.

In the process, what is now the Defense Security Service is being renamed as the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency as it absorbs an OPM unit of some 2,000 employees called the National Background Investigations Bureau. That in turn was formed as a semi-independent entity within OPM in the wake of the 2015 disclosure of a breach of OPM’s background investigations database involving financial, personal and other information on millions of current and former federal employees, military personnel and others who had undergone background checks dating back more than a decade.

The move does not directly affect the other major planned element of the administration’s plans, moving to the GSA the personnel services it provides to other agencies under contract and the management of the federal employee retirement and insurance programs. What’s left of OPM would become a policy office under OMB.

Concerns about politicization of the federal workforce have led to calls in Congress to block the money needed for those further changes, a decision that lies ahead as Congress begins writing spending bills for the fiscal year starting in October.