Transitioning out of the Department of Defense

[Before I begin *my* piece, I'd like you to read this excerpt from an article by Jeremy Scahill, as it's pertinent.]

On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.

"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."

The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military." [Written by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation. Click here to read the full article.]

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In March 2003 I began working for Defense Security Service (DSS), an agency which was part of the Department of Defense (DOD). My job title was Special Agent, and my job was to conduct background investigations on US military personnel, DOD civilian personnel and DOD contractors – anyone who might need a DOD security clearance. In March 2003, 9/11 was still a very recent event. The war in Afghanistan was well underway and the war in Iraq was just beginning. The threat of terrorism loomed larger than life. It was a time when nearly every phrase uttered by a politician contained the words “national security.” One would therefore assume that my agency, as the people determining who should and who should not gain access to classified materials and locations, would have been viewed as an integral part of the DOD. However, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

When I joined DSS in March 2003, the agency was alive with rumors of a possible transfer of DSS out of the DOD and into another agency: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM – the agency which manages the HR side of the US government). At that time, OPM was already using private contractors to conduct background investigations on people requiring lower level clearances. There were rumors that our entire agency was to be privatized in order to make the security clearance business more cost-effective. Private contractors contracted by OPM were paid by the numbers of cases they closed. DSS employees received a government salary based on years on years of employment.

Now, all jobs should set standards for their employees, and certainly there are many jobs in the world in which basing pay on the amount of projects completed is perfectly acceptable. You might assume, however, that the US government would be willing to pay top dollar in order to ensure that security clearances weren’t being issued to budding terrorists. But you would be wrong.

Higher-ups in the DOD felt that the agency was paying DSS far too much money per investigation… money which could be better spent in Iraq. Then OPM offered to do the job for less. The transition of DSS out of DOD and into OPM took roughly one year. DSS was renamed the Center for Federal Investigative Services (CFIS).

One of the first things that OPM did during the transition was to get rid of most of the IT staff, with the idea being that each office did not need its own IT specialist. Instead, they created a sparsely-staffed call center for employees with computer problems to call. Many of my coworkers were above the age of fifty and not overly computer literate. The loss of our IT guy meant that those of us in the office who were younger and more computer savvy frequently spent hours assisting coworkers with their computers. And since the next thing that OPM did was to provide us with a completely different set of software, we were kept very busy indeed!

When I first arrived at DSS in 2003, they were using a case-writing/reporting software which worked in conjunction with Microsoft Office and Access 97. I remember wondering why they were using something so out of date. Little did I know what was to come! As part of our transition to OPM, we received “new” case management software. The program was DOS-based and had been written in 1984. OPM representatives went to great lengths to assure us that this “new” software was so much better than the software we’d been using. We were told, among other things, that it was faster, easier to use, and more efficient. Now I don’t know how recently (if ever) any of you have worked in DOS (I hadn’t since I was a kid), but faster, easier to use, and more efficient are hardly the adjectives DOS inspires. The new system was cumbersome, slow, and difficult to use even once you knew how. Report writing, which had previously been the easiest part of the investigatory process became the most difficult part overnight. Additionally, in order to transmit ones reports, one had to log into the mainframe. Unfortunately, the system was not designed to accommodate that many users. There were several occasions when I would try for hours (after coming home from work) to transmit a case, and was unable to do so until after midnight. More efficient? The truth of the matter was, the DOS-based program was cheaper to run.

Additionally, OPM decided that DSS had been too lax in its production standards. Under DSS, agents received points for each interview conducted. Short interviews and records reviews earned a small number of points, whereas lengthy interviews (some interviews took hours; others took days) earned a much larger number of points. We needed to earn a certain number of points per month for our performance to be considered fully successful. Under OPM the system was revised drastically. OPM expected to conduct a certain number of interviews per day, period. This meant that if you had a serious interview that spanned two or three days, you could still be rated unsuccessful if you were unable to catch up on your numbers. You might have just stopped a spy from getting a clearance, but if you weren’t making your numbers it didn’t matter. If you took too long to close a case, you were wasting Uncle Sam’s money. It didn’t matter that you’d done a good job. Speed was valued far more than quality.

Four months after DSS formally became CFIS, I quit and changed careers entirely. But that’s a tale of transition for another day.