The NA-74, Office of Personnel and Facility Clearances and Classification (OPFCC), located on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is responsible for implementing all Department of Energy (DOE) personnel security and facility clearance requirements for all National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) field sites. NA-74 is also responsible for the continued maintenance and enhancements of the Clearance Action Tracking System (CATS), DOE’s enterprise application used to manage all Personnel Vetting requirements for the cleared and uncleared federal and contractor workforce. The CATS development project was initiated in 2015 by NA-74 to replace NNSA’s existing clearance case management system. The application deployed in June 2019.
CATS is highly customized, fully automated, case management system that replicates the DOE’s personnel vetting processes, end-to-end. In essence, it accomplishes this automation by “flowing” a case through the process from inception (customer request), all the way through the lifecycle of the case, up to the point of expunging the record (when required) after the case has been terminated.
Unlike its predecessor, CATS was designed as an enterprise system, and is now used by all seven DOE Cognizant Personnel Security Offices (CPSO). Furthermore, the application is being expanded to support additional stakeholders, such as Human Reliability Program (HRP) Certifying Officials, the Office of Intelligence & Counterintelligence, Human Capital, DOE’s Power Administrations, and M&O contractor customers. CATS currently houses roughly 300K cases and has roughly 500 users geographically located across the United States. Over 10K case actions are completed in CATS each month. As such, continued maintenance of this application is critical to meeting the DOE/NNSA mission. NA-74 requires an information technology support services contract in support of CATS maintenance.
In addition, NA-74 also requires program support services in support of implementing Trusted Workforce 2.0 and other personnel security, intelligence/counterintelligence, cyber and human capital requirements. TW 2.0 was launched in 2018 by the Director of National Intelligence and aims to better support agencies’ missions by reducing the time required to bring new hires onboard, enabling mobility of the Federal workforce, and improving insight into workforce behaviors. It is the most far-reaching reform of the Federal Government’s personnel vetting process ever. The approach used today for personnel vetting was developed decades ago. Over time, it has been modified as new threats were identified, but the underlying framework remains the same. Personnel vetting processes require modern transformational reform in line with today’s complex missions, societal norms, threat landscape, changing workforce, and evolving technology. As such, DOE requires an innovative approach to re-brand the CATS application, further secure our data, and automate additional processes stemming from personnel vetting reform. The contractor will be required to gather and refine requirements identified by the Department, assist various CPSOs and program offices with process gap analysis/resolution, and provide technical guidance and schedules for DOE development initiatives.
CATS is currently hosted by the NNSA Office of Information Management (NA-IM) on the Albuquerque Complex Network (ACN). Historically, all NNSA applications were developed, maintained, and hosted/overseen by NA-IM. The CATS project is unique in that NA-74 was responsible for the development & maintenance activities, while NA-IM was still responsible for operations and cyber activities. NA-74 will be working with NA-IM and Microsoft to migrate CATS to the cloud. This effort requires additional resources with a new set of skills/capabilities. The contractor will assume responsibility for planning, migration, and operations of the cloud while NA-IM will continue to oversee all cyber activities.
