Originally Posted by GUWonder

The dynamic about applicants' costs is reason enough for me to be thankful for the programs being separate.

I am no fan of outsourcing background checks for any of these type of programs to other countries -- and that even extends to program participating partner countries. I've seen my share and then some of US citizens ending up with false derogatory information on file in foreign government intelligence/law enforcement/court databases/files that stubbornly remains even when the USG has absolute evidence of the foreign authorities' derogatory information being obviously false given the USG's own records/material. And the USG too has some of the same sort of issues with false derogatory info stubbornly sticking around and adversely impacting people. Unfortunately, there is more and more of the "anything for security" data-sharing and less and less concern about false (or even deliberately manipulative) derogatory information becoming a bigger problem because of "data-sharing".