National Background Investigation Bureau Director Charles Phalen said the agency started preparing to move into the Defense Department upon the enactment of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act in 2017, MeriTalk reported Monday.
Phalen noted during the Government Matters program that the 2018 NDAA required the DoD to handle its portion of background investigations from NBIB.
“We have been working very closely with the department ever since the [NDAA] came out back in December, first on the partial shift, now [we are] focused completely on the whole piece,†he said.
However, the bureau still needs to wait for a presidential executive order to formalize its integration into the DoD.
Phalen noted that the executive order, which will elaborate on NBIB’s merger with DoD, is currently being processed.
He added that working with the department in the past few months has reduced the number of pending background investigations that the agency needed to handle.