While most of the people who work at NIH have complied with the process of obtaining new ID badges, which have required background or “suitability” checks, there remains a cohort of roughly 2,300 individuals who have not yet jumped all the hurdles. In the not too distant future, these folks may face a three-strikes situation before they will find their cards disabled, said Richie Taffet, acting director of the Division of Personnel Security and Access Control.

The announcement that there was such a large population of noncompliant workers came at the December meeting of CABS, the community advisory board for security, which has met in the wake of 9/11 to manage community concerns about dramatic increases in security requirements at NIH.
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Latoya Headley, a month shy of her 23rd birthday, and with no history of ill health, woke up one morning to find that she could not walk.

“She was paralyzed from the waist down,” recalls her mother, Darlene Headley-Johnson. As she rushed her daughter to the ER at Inova Fairfax Hospital, “We had to hold her like a baby.”

“It came out of nowhere,” Latoya says.
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