Pentagon finds ID problems affecting 215,000 troops

0:00Print servers and federal environments create risk and unnecessary complexity. Every new printer, location, or policy adds strain to infrastructure that was never built for today's demands. FedRAMP High authorized printer logic eliminates print servers with a secure cloud native, zero-trust solution designed for federal IT. With advanced security, centralized control, and simplified management, agencies can modernize print without added burden. See what secure serverless printing looks like. Visit VAsian.com to learn more. Federal Drive is presented by GEHA, government employees' health association, proudly providing health and dental benefits to federal employees and their families. Visit GEHA.com. The Pentagon is trying to clean up the records behind military ID cards used by hundreds of thousands of service members. About 215,000 active duty and reserve troops have records that are missing proof of identity. But the Defense Department says there's no evidence of fraud. Federal News Network's Rachel Cohen joins us with the story. Rachel, Hi, Eric. Hello, hello. So what did the Pentagon find and why are so many troops being asked to

1:04update their records right now? The Pentagon found that about 215,000 active duty and reserve troops had records in its personnel database that didn't have the required digital copies of two identity documents. Those include things like, you drive a license, your passport, things that are supposed to establish that the person getting the military ID is who they say they are. The Pentagon describes it as an administrative gap rather than a new security requirement or any indication that there's a problem. The important point is that troops already went through identity checks when they joined. So they already had to go to an ID office with these kinds of paperwork. But the Pentagon doesn't always keep digital copies of the documents in the system. So let me try to understand how did people get through the ID check process in the first place if the Pentagon didn't have these right documents on file. Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about kind of poking through the story. The Pentagon says

2:06it is standard procedure to verify somebody's identity when they join. But apparently the record system didn't consistently preserve copies of the documents that people brought for that verification. So having a missing document in Deers, which is the personnel system doesn't necessarily mean the person was never properly vetted. It just means the Pentagon doesn't necessarily have the documentation in the electronic record that it now says needs to be there. Things can also happen like you bring a driver's license and then a few years later it expires. And you haven't updated it. So that could also make you paying as being out of compliance. All right. So DOD says that this is an administrative problem and there's no sign of fraud. But these days you really can't count that out whenever you're talking about missing proof of identity when it comes to data. How serious is this? And are there any actual risks that this could turn into fraud or fraudulent activity if some records aren't brought up to date?

3:09So I think one thing that I would notice as of right now there's, you know, like I said, 215,000 people give or take who fall into the category. They've been looking for people since January, the January is when they started pinging the services to talk to people about it. So we don't really know how big the overall group is. And so the immediate concern there is really making sure people who have these cards have records that meet the department's security requirements for, you know, the integrity of those credentials. It can be a practical problem for service members down the road if their cards are eventually canceled, right? You know, common access card is used to get onto installations, get onto secure networks, various other kinds of services. So losing it can be disruptive, even if there's no, you know, broader security incident. Talking here with federal news network defense reporter Rachel Cohen. So what is the fix to the problem and how can service members help? So they're being notified, you know, they're being emailed.

4:13They've said it's a it's a phased approach. So folks need to go into, you know, their local rapids office, their local ID office and present to, you know, valid original ID documents. So not a photocopy of your license, you know, not a picture on your phone of your of your passport or or something like that. Original identity documents so that those docs can be put into their record. There is a potential consequence, but two of the services said they haven't canceled any taxes part of the review so far. You know, in the Pentagon also hasn't clearly said how long everybody has to become compliant. So that's, you know, one of the big outstanding questions here. Yeah, there seem to be still a lot of unanswered questions. What do we know about who's actually affected by this discrepancy? And what is the Pentagon not telling us here for fear of having that information being used against it? Sure. So we know the Army accounts for roughly half of the troops who are affected right now. The Army had nearly 111,000

5:20tax that were out of compliance as of September 2nd. The Marine Corps reported about 21,500 affected Marines at the end of July. So that leaves, you know, roughly 82,000 people across the rest of the force. But we don't have a clear breakdown of who they are, you know, what service they're in. The Air Force says it's not aware of a widespread problem with active duty cacks, the Navy referred questions to the Pentagon. So we don't have a complete picture of how this is distributed across the military. How long people have to fix their records or, you know, what the Pentagon can do to prevent it from happening again? Yeah, I guess then my last question of there being a timeline, you're going to say, well, we don't know yet. Right. Federal News Network's Rachel Cohen, Defense Reporter, thank you so much for telling us the story. Thank you. You can find more of your story at federalnewsnetwork.com. What does it take to drive transformational change in large mission-driven organizations?

6:20In this episode of Lessons in Leadership, former Treasury Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebrick sits down with WAPA CEO Shane Canfield to explore the answer to that question, drawing on nearly four decades of public service. Lebrick shares insights on how to maintain employee trust and accountability while striving for strategic leadership and operational excellence. He discusses his biggest lessons learned from modernizing major government systems and how he worked to break down silos and build high-performing teams, all while staying rooted in character and integrity. Hello and welcome to the Lessons in Leadership podcast. I'm your host Shane Canfield, CEO of WAPA. Today I'm joined by David Lebrick, former Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the department's most senior career position, where he spent nearly four decades help oversee and modernize the federal government's financial infrastructure, including payments, collecting, debt financing, and cash management. David, welcome and thank you for being here. It's a real pleasure to be here. So let's jump right in. What does it actually

7:25take to drive transformational change inside the federal government and related, Treasury is obviously a huge organization. What did that teach you about leadership as you drove these changes? Sure. I think one of the things that you realize at time is that change and transformational change is very difficult, but it is doable. I think sometimes we don't think that we can do big things in government and yet we can. I think over the course of my career I was enormously fortunate to work with some other really wonderful people, some of the most preeminent people in government, over the course of the last 35 years. From them you learn a lot of really important lessons about leadership. I think early in my career what I would tell you is that I was very much new, my interacted with political appointees as a civil servant, that you're really an advisor. And I had some really wonderful experiences advising some of really great people. My second job at

8:27Treasury, for example, was as a special assistant to J. Powell. I knew I was not going to be the most the smartest person in the room or the expert on many things that were going on, but what I did know is that I had a very good understanding about what it meant to navigate in government. Also, what it meant to advise and provide options and analysis to decision-makers. As you move up in your career and you actually take on more operational responsibility, you find out that you are a decision-maker. And when you are a decision-maker, I had a very good framework that I used throughout my career, which is as a well-edred organization, the leadership had to think about three very distinct things. One was thinking strategically about where the organization was going, not just about where it was going tomorrow and the next day, but actually into the future. The second area was that you really had to be able to deliver in the operational excellence. So if you're responsible for providing a service or a product, you can do that well. And you

9:29think very purposefully about that. And the third area is really about people and about how you attract good people, how you retain good people, how you incent good people, and how you really treat people. And so throughout my career, I had an opportunity to see people be very effective in all three of those areas. So when it came time to do transformational change, that model worked very well. I would also say that what you learn very early on is that regardless, is that you, as an individual, it takes the ability to work collectively and collaboratively with a lot of people. And so some of the things that I did, for example, which were cross-government, you realize that you really didn't have authority over many of the people that you were asking to do something different. But if you had character and competence, you could actually have trust. And so I think when people looked and said, this is someone who has capability and they have character, they will actually go and reduce the friction and actually making change. And so those collaborative

10:32relationships, that ability to sort of lead with purpose, I think was very important with respect to really driving transformational change. Yeah, that's an amazing perspective. I just had a chance to listen in a small room to the CEO and the chairman of the board for Marriott Corporation. And they're celebrating their 100th birthday next year. And many, most US companies don't make it to 100. And so it was, it was fascinating. Both of them were asked to what do you attribute this? And they said, both of them, with energy, it was about their people. They focused on their people and everything came back to the employees, the people that worked there, the people that they have to motivate. Do you find something similar in government? I do. I actually take, you know, oftentimes you hear people say people the most important asset in an organization. And there's

11:36an element of truth to that. But I also think that leadership is probably the most important aspect attribute in organization. Because if you have the right leaders and you're using a framework, like I mentioned, you're going to be really focused on getting good people in the organization. And those people will thrive. I think the thing that you find certainly in government is that federal employees are very mission driven. And they are committed. And they, you know, there's a lot of discussion about, you know, what really motivates people? Intrancyc versus extrinsic, you know, motivators. And I really do believe that, you know, when you really get a high performing organization, regardless of as private sector or public sector, it's going to be those intrinsic things which are going to actually drive employees to do great things. And so setting up those right working conditions to remind people how important they are to actually invest in their development to actually give them good feedback. You know, one of the things that is really important in an organization is if you really care about an employee and you really want to see them develop,

12:39you have to tell them not only good things, you have to tell them things they have to work on. And I think you need to set up an environment and we add a saying which is feedback as a gift and and assume noble intent in intent so that when someone gives you feedback, your first reaction shouldn't be defensive. It should be, let me make sure I can really understand why I'm getting feedback and what I can do about that. You know, I think of a story from a book called Radical Candor in which the author had gone out and spent a lot of time recruiting a new executive in the organization and thought they had a perfect match. They got to six months and the executive was struggling and they ultimately fired the executive. And at the Ex-Interview, she had turned to the executive and he said, well, I really was someone who had told me earlier on what I wasn't doing well. And I tell that story because I think it sort of says that if you're not giving good feedback to people, you've spent all this money on recruiting someone, all this time and we know

13:42it takes a lot of time to bring people on board. And if you're not giving them the benefit of it, you're not giving regular feedback to someone about what they can do better, then you potentially have a failure and you have another vacancy that you have to fill which is very costly and expensive. So I think you need to have another element of that which is in a high performing organization. If people are comfortable raising their hand when something's not going right and in my world, large-scale operations and what we did every day, something doesn't go right. It's just inevitable. And the issue within a well performing, high-performing organization is that people will raise their hand and say we have a problem and we need to fix it and the leadership is receptive to that and says, okay, what do we need to do? And then after the problem is solved, you have an obligation to go back and do lessons learned, do action learning to see, hey, what could we have done differently? How could we have avoided that problem so that you have a learning organization? It's not just that you're comfortable communicating and have trust in the organization that you can communicate

14:46openly, but also that you're learning as you go along every day to improve your operations. The very first podcast we had was Cutler Dawson who was Admiral and the Navy, charge of the enterprise carrier and the fleet in the beginning of Desert Storm. And then he went on to run Navy Federal, the world's largest credit union. And it was fascinating to hear you because he talked, he used an example of a problem they had on deck with airplanes on the carrier and it was pretty serious accident that happened. His culture was exactly what you said. You've got to talk whether you're at fault or not, whether you're partly at fault, it doesn't matter. We have to have an honest conversation about this. And that doesn't mean there weren't consequences, but at the same time that honesty has to be front and center. It really is true. And I think that you raised an interesting point, which I think

15:48sometimes the word accountability has a negative connotation. You're going to be held accountable. But also, but I would have it in a different way, which is we're accountable for high performance and we're accountable to each other to make sure that we can deliver on our mission. And that's a positive attribute along the way. And I think when organizations take that seriously, the collaboration, the teamwork, the openness, the feedback, but they also have a culture of accountability that says we do things well. We're going to actually be successful at what we do. And we all have an commitment to doing that. I think you're really a high performing organization. You've been listening to a preview edition of Lessons in Leadership. To hear the rest of this conversation and all past episodes, subscribe to Lessons in Leadership wherever you get your podcasts.