Thursday, July 09, 2009
Oklahoma City Bombing April 21, 1995 (photo: Staff Sergeant Preston Chasteen)
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Obama administration intends to shake up the Federal Protective Service (FPS), the agency in charge of providing security for all federal government buildings, after learning how easy it is to carry bomb-making materials into the heart of the U.S. government.
Investigators with the Government Accountability Office spent the past year testing the security of certain federal buildings by smuggling liquid explosives and detonators past guards and checkpoints. Not only that, but once inside the buildings, they were also able to assemble the materials into bombs and walk around with them without detection. Although GAO officials did not publicly reveal which buildings they tested, it was reported that some of the locations included offices housing U.S. senators and House members, as well as operations for the departments of Justice, State, and—yes—Homeland Security.
Considering it was a federal building in Oklahoma City that was blown up by domestic terrorists in 1995, the revelations about lax security alarmed both current and former government officials. “A federal office building represents to an awful lot of people the U.S. government and if anybody has a problem with the U.S. government, they’re going to take it out,” Harry “Skip” Brandon, a former deputy assistant director at the FBI who specialized in national security and counterterrorism, told ABC News. “It’s appalling to me that we see that, in fact, they’re not even minimally protected.”
The Federal Protective Service relies largely on private security guards to protect most of the 9,000 facilities it oversees. More than one million people work in federal government buildings, including 350,000 alone in Washington, DC.
At one time, FPS was part of the General Services Administration. But with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the agency became part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a move that wound up cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from the FPS budget and forcing staff reductions.
Legislation on Capitol Hill would move FPS again, this time to the National Protection and Programs Directorate, a collection of agencies responsible for assessing security risks.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
'Shocking' Security Breaches at Federal Buildings (by Pierre Thomas and Jack Date, ABC News)
GAO: Major Security Flaws at Federal Buildings (by Ed O’Keefe, Washington Post)
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