The workforce of the United States federal government is in many ways the backbone of the country’s most important missions. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency was established to ensure that this workforce is properly vetted and composed of the right people.
In a new video interview with Executive Mosaic, DCSA Director William Lietzau shared some important milestones in the agency’s personnel security reform efforts and discussed how DCSA is moving forward with more efficient and effective processes.
“We do about 90 percent of the U.S. government’s clearances — everything from a child care worker to a top secret,” said Lietzau, a 2023 Wash100 Award winner, in conversation with Executive Mosaic’s Summer Myatt. “What in 2018 was about 400 days to do just the investigation part of a top secret clearance, today we’re in the mid nineties, we’ve got about an 80% reduction. So we’re faster.”
Lietzau said DCSA is now harnessing the power of data to perform continuous vetting at not only a more rapid pace, but at a lower cost overall.
“We’re using continuous vetting now and we’re finding things at a much faster pace, able to take corrective action with people who maybe shouldn’t have a clearance at a much earlier juncture — probably somewhere between 5 to 7 years earlier than we were catching them using other methods, because we have continuous data feeds that are helping us to do that in an automated way — and we’re doing it at lower cost,” Lietzau explained.
“Since this became an agency, we’ve lowered costs for the taxpayer three times. We’re returning about $300 million to the taxpayer and to our government customer agencies. We have over 100 customer agencies that pay us for products. So we’re better, faster, cheaper. And I couldn’t be prouder of what this team has done in transforming personnel vetting since coming together,” he added.
Hear more about how Lietzau is leading DCSA through modernization and reform — watch his full video interview here.
