In general, agencies comply with employee background check requirement
Nearly 90 percent of employees with unsupervised access to federal facilities have been checked out.
If he is to be believed, Pfc. Bradley Manning, a lone soldier with a security clearance, was able to steal hundreds of thousands sensitive government documents and turn them over to the WikiLeaks consortium, which published them recently.
A rigorous background check on Manning obviously failed to detect signs that he might be unreliable, but the government has been trying hard to make sure that its employees are dependable and its secrets are safe.
A homeland-security directive issued by President Bush in 2004 was supposed to ensure that every employee whose job required unsupervised access to government facilities was subject to a background check called an NACI (National Agency Check and Inquiries) investigation. That was a tall order because of the sheer numbers of workers involved. Six years later, the government says that it's mostly compliant.
According to figures provided to National Journal, 87 percent of the 4.5 million government employees who need an NACI got one. For the 1 million contractors, the number is 83 percent.
Every government agency-from Cabinet departments to obscure prestige boards (the Marine Mammal Commission, for example) must submit regular compliance reports to the Office of Personnel Management.
Among the most successful: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which says that 100 percent of its employees have been cleared. The State Department also says it's perfect. But the U.S. Agency for International Development, not so much: The agency reports a compliance rate of only 43 percent.