US disregarded input on location of lab, files show
Mississippi said to benefit
WASHINGTON - The Homeland Security Department swept aside evaluations of government experts and named Mississippi - home to powerful US lawmakers with sway over the agency - as a top location for a new $451 million, national laboratory to study some of the world's most virulent biological threats, according to internal documents obtained by the Associated Press.
Mississippi's lawmakers include the Democratic chairman of the department's oversight committee in the House and the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is expected to approve money to build the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility at one of five sites being considered. The facility would replace an existing 24-acre research complex on isolated Plum Island, about 100 miles northeast of New York City in the Long Island Sound.
The two lawmakers said they were unaware of the Homeland Security evaluation system that scored the Mississippi site so low.
The disclosure is the latest example of what critics assert is the Bush administration's politicizing of government decisions, such as efforts to steer science over global warming at the Environmental Protection Agency and hiring and firing practices at the Justice Department.
"It is very suspicious," said Irwin Goldman of the University of Wisconsin, a leader of the unsuccessful effort to build the lab in Madison. His community's offer was among nine sites rejected even though the government scored it more highly than Mississippi's.
The states where locations were eliminated despite earning scores higher than Mississippi include California, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Government experts originally expressed concerns that the proposed site in Flora, Miss., was far from existing biodefense research programs and lacked ready access to workers already familiar with highly contagious animal and human diseases, such as foot-and-mouth virus, that could devastate the US livestock industry. They assigned the site a score that ranked it 14th among 17 candidate sites in the United States.
But a senior Homeland Security official, Undersecretary Jay Cohen, overruled those concerns under the theory that skilled researchers would move to Mississippi if it were selected for the new lab, according to a July 2007 internal government memorandum, marked "sensitive information" and obtained by the AP. Cohen accepted the argument that, "When built, they come."
A former Navy officer, Cohen is a political appointee, nominated by President Bush in June 2006.
For Wisconsin, Cohen determined that community opposition to the new lab was too great despite the area's highly respected researchers. Some local officials had threatened to withhold sewer service from the lab.
"It raised my eyebrows a bit when Mississippi was selected," said George Stewart of the University of Missouri, another rejected location that also earned a score higher than Mississippi's. "Obviously, there were factors other than what they were looking in the site visits. The group that did the site visits were scientists and know what they were looking for. I don't know what DHS was looking for."
