And so, as inevitably will happen in every dispute between two parties in the USA, it's come to a
lawsuit. The big players in Maryland politics are desperate to snatch back that FBI HQ land development deal from the District of Colombia, where the Trump administration recently decided that it should go.
Their arguments leave me completely unpersuaded, but then, there isn't any money in it for me whichever way the decision goes.
Maryland's case relies first of all on the premise that a 100 percent proper site selection process resulted in the choice of the Greenbelt, Maryland, site.
Maryland earned the new FBI headquarters through a fair and transparent selection process that took more than 10 years – a rigorous evaluation that identified Greenbelt as the site best suited to meet the FBI's security, operational space, and mission needs," said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown during the news conference.
However, that fair and transparent process had earlier resulted in the selection of the Springfield, Virginia, site, after which a brand new GSA official dropped into the process and overruled the selection committee to award the project to Maryland.
Most interestingly, that official came from a career at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which coincidentally is the owner of the Greenbelt property.
A cynical person might suspect some kind of funny business went on there.
Anyway, the Greenbelt selection was in turn overridden by the Trumpening, which changed the project concept from one of new, purpose-built, construction to the adaptive reuse of an existing federal office building, the Ronald Reagan Center in DC's Federal Triangle.
That change in project concept creates what might be Maryland's strongest argument, which is that the Federal Triangle site cannot meet all of the physical security standards that should apply to an FBI HQ.
And what standards are those exactly? Well, that probably gets into Matters of Official Concern which I must avoid. But I think it can be said without revealing anything sensitive that one of those standards rhymes with "get back."
The Maryland side must be feeling pretty sure of itself when it plays the security card. We all know that security is sacrosanct in government business, right?
Wrong! You see, those standards must be interpreted, and application policy followed, not to mention risk assessments performed, cost/benefit analysis done, and final decisions to be made by the responsible officials, including the potential decision to waive standards and accept risk.
Oh, let me tell you, from the bottom of my governmental heart, nothing is guaranteed where security standards are concerned.
I'll venture one small guess about what might become of that "get back" problem. It could be risk-analyzed away by someone who reasons that in a built-up urban landscape such as the Federal Triangle a vehicle-borne attacker would have limited approach routes to a target such as the Reagan Building, and therefore adequate "get back" really kinda exists.
By contrast the Greenbelt site would have practically unlimited straight and level high-speed approaches to its perimeter.
How's that for being a security problem solver?
If this shutdown continues a few more weeks I might just send GSA or DHS a resume and pitch them on my alternative risk mitigation powers.
