Green zone on the green line: the Department of Homeland Security goes house hunting in one of Washington's most troubled neighborhoods.

• Author: Blake, Matthew
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

When the U.S. Office of Personnel Management surveyed the job satisfaction of the federal workforce in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security ranked at or near the bottom in nearly every category. It was another dubious distinction for the department, which had launched with much fanfare in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the largest overhaul of the federal bureaucracy since Harry Truman created the Department of Defense. But DHS was the kind of sweeping but light-on-the-details gesture at which the Bush administration excelled, gathering twenty-two agencies with often unrelated missions--from fighting terrorism to issuing green cards to inspecting fishing boats' safety gear--under a single roof. It was a recipe for bureaucratic dysfunction, not least because the department didn't actually have a single roof; its member agencies were scattered among seventy different buildings in forty discrete Beltway locations.

Unlike the new department's other institutional pathologies, this problem seemed like it wouldn't be that difficult to solve. But where do you find the real estate to house 14,000 employees within the already cramped confines of the District of Columbia? Pentagon-sized plots of land aren't exactly easy to come by. In the fall of 2005, following DHS's botched response to Hurricane Katrina, then Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ratcheted up his pleas to the General Services Administration, the federal government's landlord, to find them a home. The GSA bureaucrats came back with an idea. For decades, the federal government had been trying to find a use for St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a century-and-a-half-old former mental hospital in Washington's Anacostia neighborhood. It was in bad shape, but it was big enough to house the homeless Homeland Security. And the neighborhood, one of the most crime-ridden in the city, was very much in the market for development opportunities, as local City Councilman Marion Barry--the oft-disgraced former mayor of Washington and de facto mayor-for-life of Anacostia--would happily tell you.

The plan, which was approved in January, does not in its general contours appear to be the most promising arrangement in the world: move the most dysfunctional department in the federal government into the most troublesome building the government owns, in one of the District's worst neighborhoods, presided over by the city's most famously questionable politician. In fact, the only thing...