By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, much of Maryland’s modern homeland-security and intelligence-sharing infrastructure still traces directly back to that morning — built in the years that followed by a governor, federal prosecutors, state legislators, and university researchers determined that the state needed permanent machinery for a threat that its existing emergency plans had never been designed to confront on that scale.
The Governor’s Office of Homeland Security
The clearest executive-branch legacy is the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security (GOHS), created in July 2003 by then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. through Executive Order 01.01.2003.18 — an order that cited the September 11 attacks and Maryland’s proximity to Washington directly. The office was designed to coordinate homeland security efforts across every level of state government, advise the governor on public safety threats, and serve as Maryland’s primary liaison to the federal Department of Homeland Security. Notably, the new office wasn’t built from scratch: the order tasked the state’s existing emergency management agency, which predates 9/11 by decades, with providing its logistical and administrative backbone — a sign that Maryland’s post-9/11 architecture was layered onto Cold War-era civil defense infrastructure rather than replacing it outright.
“Maryland’s post-9/11 architecture was layered onto Cold War-era civil defense infrastructure rather than replacing it outright.”
More than two decades later, the office remains active, though its leadership has changed twice since this project began. Gov. Wes Moore appointed Travis Nelson, a 19-year veteran of the Maryland State Police who had served a year and a half as acting director, to the post outright in May 2025; Nelson had previously co-chaired Maryland’s Active Assailant Interdisciplinary Work Group and commanded the State Police’s Complex Operations Management Unit. By early 2026, he had moved into a Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor role in the Governor’s office, where he now oversees GOHS and several other public-safety agencies rather than running GOHS directly; Marcia Deppen has served as interim director since. The office’s mission has broadened over time in other ways — Gov. Larry Hogan temporarily expanded GOHS’s responsibilities into statewide cybersecurity planning in 2017, though that authority was later folded into a separate cybersecurity structure Hogan built at the Department of Information Technology, which the General Assembly codified into law in 2021. GOHS still deals with threats that carry cyber dimensions, but the standalone statewide cybersecurity-planning mandate no longer sits with the office.
Maryland’s Fusion Center
Perhaps the most consequential — and least visible — piece of Maryland’s post-9/11 security architecture is the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center (MCAC). Less than a week after the attacks, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft directed every U.S. Attorney’s office nationwide to establish an Anti-Terrorism Task Force. Those task forces were reconstituted as Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils in September 2003, and Maryland’s council formally opened MCAC on Nov. 3 of that year — one of the first “fusion centers” in the country, a hub designed to pool intelligence from federal, state and local agencies so that patrol officers, public health workers and emergency managers could act on threat information in something close to real time.
“Maryland’s council formally opened MCAC on Nov. 3, 2003 — one of the first ‘fusion centers’ in the country.”
MCAC now hosts Maryland’s arm of “If You See Something, Say Something,” the national tip-reporting campaign the Department of Homeland Security licensed from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and rolled out nationwide in 2010; Marylanders who spot suspicious activity are directed to MCAC’s tip line. MCAC also works alongside the Maryland State Police, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security. The fusion center concept it helped pioneer has since grown into a national network of dozens of state and major-urban-area centers — DHS assessments during the 2010s counted 78 in the network — though the network grew organically through separate state and local initiatives over several years rather than from a single federal blueprint.
The Agency Behind the Agency
“Maryland’s disaster-response machinery itself is far older than 9/11.”
That older infrastructure kept evolving too. What Ehrlich’s order called MEMA traces back, under various names, to a Maryland Council of Defense organized in 1917 and reorganized in 1950 under the federal Civil Defense Act — Cold War-era nuclear-attack planning that gradually broadened into hurricanes, floods and, eventually, terrorism. It operated for more than three decades within Maryland’s Military Department. In October 2021, the General Assembly elevated it to a full cabinet-level agency, the Maryland Department of Emergency Management, giving the state’s oldest disaster-response institution a structural weight to match the expanded mission it had quietly absorbed since 2001.
A University Partner in Preparedness
The University of Maryland’s Center for Health and Homeland Security (CHHS) grew out of the same moment, founded by law professor Michael Greenberger in 2002 in the direct aftermath of the attacks. By the center’s own account, it was tasked early on by Maryland’s emergency management agency with helping develop guidance for continuity-of-operations planning — the blueprints that let government functions continue if a disaster strikes state offices directly — work the center has continued for decades since. The center has since been renamed the Center for Cyber, Health, and Hazard Strategies, though it retains the CHHS acronym.
A Framework Still in Use
“What 9/11 changed was narrower but still substantial: it built out the state’s counterterrorism, intelligence-sharing and interagency security architecture.”
Together, these four institutions — a governor’s coordinating office, a statewide intelligence fusion center, Maryland’s elevated emergency-management department, and an academic preparedness partner — form the backbone of how Maryland now plans for, and responds to, both terrorism and other large-scale emergencies. Maryland’s disaster-response machinery itself is far older than 9/11, tracing back through Cold War civil defense to World War I-era defense councils. What 9/11 changed was narrower but still substantial: it built out the state’s counterterrorism, intelligence-sharing and interagency security architecture, and over the following two decades those newer institutions increasingly converged with the older, broader emergency-management system. The result is today’s all-hazards structure, in which counterterrorism, intelligence sharing, active-assailant preparedness, public health and traditional disaster response often run through the same overlapping networks.
“The result is today’s all-hazards structure, in which counterterrorism, intelligence sharing, active-assailant preparedness, public health and traditional disaster response often run through the same overlapping networks.”
Sources
This report draws on primary state and federal records: Executive Order 01.01.2003.18 and Executive Order 01.01.2017.22 (Maryland Division of State Documents), the Maryland Manual On-Line’s current and historical entries for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and the Maryland Department of Emergency Management (Maryland State Archives), and the U.S. Department of Justice’s own records on the Anti-Terrorism Task Force-to-Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council transition, including Ashcroft’s September 25, 2003 announcement, cross-checked against MCAC’s own site and DHS’s national fusion-center assessments. Governor’s office press releases and news coverage of Hogan’s 2019 cybersecurity executive order and the 2021 legislation that followed confirm the shift of cybersecurity authority to the Department of Information Technology. Marcia Deppen’s interim-director title is confirmed via her listing on Maryland’s Statewide Interoperability Radio Control Board. The University of Maryland’s Center for Health and Homeland Security, now the Center for Cyber, Health, and Hazard Strategies, confirms its own May 15, 2002 founding date and continuity-of-operations work in its published materials. Reporters should re-verify current GOHS and MCAC leadership before publication, as both have changed multiple times in the past two years and may change again.
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