The Defense Department (DoD) announced late Monday the appointment of William Lietzau as Director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) that oversees nearly all security clearance processes for the Federal government.
Lietzau has been Director of DoD’s Personnel Vetting Transformation Office for the past year. In taking over at DCSA he succeeds Acting Director Charles Phalen Jr., who shepherded the transfer last September of the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB) from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to DoD. NBIB was merged with the Defense Security Service to become DCSA.
DCSA has made great strides since then, cutting the Federal government’s backlog of security clearances to about 200,000 as of January, from about 300,000 in October 2019, and a backlog of 725,000 in 2018.
