S. 1388 would require the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to establish a program to train federal employees to identify and defend against counterintelligence threats to the federal supply chain. Acquisition officials at all federal agencies who are involved with managing the supply chain for information and communications technology programs would be required to attend that training. The bill also would require OMB to report to the Congress on the implementation of that training program. CBO estimates that implementing the bill would cost $27 million over the 2020-2024 period (see Table 1); that spending would be subject to the availability of appropriated funds.
The Department of Defense (DoD) has about 150,000 employees in its acquisition workforce and DoD’s contracts account for about 60 percent of all federal contracts. On that basis, CBO estimates that the acquisition workforce of the federal government totals about 250,000 people. CBO expects that 10 percent of them would require training every two years under the bill and that training for the first group of employees would begin in 2021. Using information on the costs of other federal training programs, CBO estimates that delivering that training to an average of 12,500 individuals each year would cost $10 million over the 2020-2024 period.
CBO expects that some of the information provided in that training would be classified; thus, trainees would be required to hold security clearances. The number of acquisition employees in the federal government who have security clearances is unknown. Given that lack of information, CBO assumes that 50 percent of the people who would receive training as a result of S. 1388 already possess clearances at the secret level or higher. Thus, 12,500 people would require new clearances initially and about 600 additional clearances would be processed each year beginning in 2022 as a result of personnel turnover. Background investigations for a secret clearance cost about $800. On that basis, CBO estimates that it would cost $12 million to conduct background investigations on those trainees over the 2020-2024 period.
