Return civilian security clearance investigations to OPM
What the document says“This function should be returned to OPM except for military security clearance investigations.”
After the 2015 data breach at the Office of Personnel Management, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency took over security clearance and suitability investigations for about 95 percent of the federal civilian workforce. The chapter calls that decision wrongheaded, says it grew out of an intention to dismantle OPM, and asks for the function to go back to OPM apart from military clearances.
What the document actually says“This function should be returned to OPM except for military security clearance investigations.”
Give this job back to OPM. The military should keep only its own checks.
People who handle secrets must be checked first. A defense agency now does that for most civil servants. The book says the personnel agency should do it again.
Read against the documents indexed here on August 26, 2026, and nothing was found that answers this. Nothing among the candidates moves background investigations from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency back to the Office of Personnel Management. The nearest, the memorandum on strengthening the suitability and fitness of the federal workforce, delegates to the Director of OPM the authority to make final suitability determinations and to direct an agency to remove an employee for post-appointment conduct, and orders a rulemaking to put that in place. It restores an OPM role over the suitability of civilian employees, but it is about who decides, not who investigates, it reaches conduct after appointment rather than pre-appointment background checks, and it says nothing about security clearances. The memorandum on the clearance backlog for Executive Office of the President personnel concerns interim clearances for one set of staff. That is a record of a search, not a finding that nothing has happened: an act this site does not hold, or one that answers the proposal in words unlike its own, would not be caught by it.