The issue is in our Leading account.  Leading has 2018.1 before other accounts and the script has been working fine for over a month.

A search inside a script (to get an employee name) is throwing the following error:
YOU_CANNOT_PERFORM_THIS_SEARCH_BECAUSE_YOU_DO_NOT_HAVE_PERMISSION_TO_ACCESS_EMPLOYEE_DATA
You cannot perform this search because you do not have permission to access employee data. For more information, contact your system administrator

I went to the role under which the script is running and gave it full permission for everything employee related and the script still throws the same error.  When I set the deployment to run as administrator it works, but that's not a valid solution for our project.  The role is in the Accounting Center; so the 2018.1 change to employee search data from the Employee Center is not the problem.