December 7, 2023

Late last night, House and Senate conferees released the final text for the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill includes a modified version of language SWACCA has been advocating for to make more uniform and consistent the access standards for Defense Department (DOD) contractors and others who perform work on military installations across the country. Congress is expected to pass the NDAA in the coming days, clearing the bill for the President to sign into law.

Beginning in 2022, SWACCA worked with Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) on the introduction of the “Base Access Privileges Improvement Act,” to address the mandatory background check and credentialing standards applicable to federal contractors, replacing base-specific access policies with national standards set by DOD, and standardizing protocols for determining the fitness of an individual to enter an installation and verifying their identity. We successfully lobbied to have this language included in the House version of the NDAA which was approved on July 14.

In the final text and accompanying Conference Report on the bill, DOD is directed to issue interim guidance within 30 days for determining the fitness of individuals for access to military installations, with final guidance to be issued within 180 days of the NDAA being signed into law. House and Senate conferees noted that they remained concerned by DOD’s “slow progress” in addressing longstanding base access challenges, and that a key improvement “would be the development of a DOD-wide fitness standard for installation access that applies evenly and routinely across all services and military installations in the United States.”

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