The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) is a planned United States government-run research facility that will replace the 1950s-era Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York, which is "nearing the end of its lifecycle and is too small to meet the nation’s research needs." The NBAF will be operated under the authority of the United States Department of Homeland Security, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service (USDA-ARS) and Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, Veterinary Services (USDA-APHIS-VS) as primary research partners.
The facility will be located in Manhattan, Kansas, and will employ between 250 and 350 people. Preliminary clearing work began at the future location of the 570,000-square-foot (53,000 m2) facility in 2010. It was originally scheduled to become fully operational by 2015, but that timeline has been delayed.
After the Manhattan location was finalized in 2009, the Government Accountability Office questioned the choice of location in a July 2010 draft report, because it is located on the mainland U.S. unlike the current Plum Island facility. This led to a further "site-specific" study of the facility's safety, issued by DHS in 2012.
Read more about National Bio And Agro-Defense Facility: Background, NBAF Construction
Famous quotes containing the words national and/or facility:
“I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Virtue rejects facility to be her companion.... She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)