Proposed NSA Headquarters Expansion Under Review
The National Security Agency is proposing to expand and modernize its headquarters site at Fort Meade, Maryland.
“For NSA/CSS to continue leading the Intelligence Community into the next 50 years with state-of-the-art technologies and productivity, its mission elements require new, centralized facilities and infrastructure,” according to a newly released Final Environmental Impact Statement for the site.
Under the proposed action, “The NSA would consolidate mission elements, which would enable grouping services and support services across the NSA Campus based on function; facilitate a more collaborative environment and optimal adjacencies; and provide administrative capacity for up to 13,300 personnel, including 6,100 personnel who currently work on the existing NSA Campus and 7,200 personnel currently located off site.”
The proposal envisions the construction and operation of “approximately 2,880,000 square feet of operational complex and headquarters space consisting of five buildings.” If approved, construction would take place “over a period of approximately 10 years (FY 2019 to 2029).”
See Final Environmental Impact Statement for the East Campus Integration Program, Fort Meade, Maryland, March 2017 (large pdf).
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.