Meet The “Mental Asylum” – The Department Of Homeland Security’s New ‘Pentagon’
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
07/29/2013
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is building a $4.5 billion headquarters at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a former mental asylum. It’s the largest construction project in DC since the Pentagon was completed in 1943 and won’t be completed until 2026 – a decade behind schedule and $1 billion over budget (with no guarantee that the next stage of the project will be fully funded). St. Elizabath’s was the oldest federally funded psychiatric hospital in the country and irony of ironies for the endless sprawl of agencies that has become the DHS, the hospital’s most infamous resident was John Hinckley, Jr., the man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Today, DHS has 240,000 employees and a yearly budget of $60 billion and St. Elizabeths’ first new tenants – the Coast Guard – will move in this August. But, as Bloomberg Businessweek notes, the future of the rest of the project remains uncertain and “[It’s] increasingly apparent that DHS’s scheme to build its headquarters on the grounds of a former mental hospital is inherently flawed,” he writes. “Some would say it’s crazy.”
The Rest…HERE
