That's amazing. A facility with 1600 employees that needed untold resources to construct is decommissioned as useless because the Washington Post writes an article about it.
They're of course within their rights to do so, but it's sad to think that all the work needed for the facility went to waste and its employees were laid off just because someone wrote an article on it.
It wasn't an unprecedented decision. Mount Weather in Virginia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operati...) was an even bigger project designed to house and protect the executive branch, but it was compromised through sheer bad luck when in 1974 a TWA flight happened to crash into it. Reporters came to report on the crash and were surprised to find this huge, massively secure, fenced-off Federal installation in the middle of nowhere.
Mount Weather wasn't shut down after that, but its role as a key relocation point was scaled back considerably. The problem with Mount Weather after 1974 was the same problem as the Greenbrier bunker had after 1992 -- the entire value of a facility like that is dependent on the Soviets not knowing it exists, because hydrogen bombs are so powerful that it's pretty much impossible to build anything that can survive a direct hit. The only way facilities like the Greenbrier, or Mount Weather, or even Cheyenne Mountain could hope to survive in a full-out nuclear war would be if they were secret enough so that the enemy wouldn't target them directly.
Thankfully the prospects of full-out nuclear war aren't as bad as they used to be, so the investment in most of these facilities isn't totally wasted; many government leaders were relocated to Mount Weather on 9/11, for instance, when it wasn't clear if more terrorist attacks were imminent, and Dick Cheney is said to have worked for a time in the days after 9/11 out of Raven Rock. Neither facility would survive a direct hit from an ICBM, but when your enemies don't have ICBMs they're pretty much as secure as you can get.
I would actually doubt that, myself. The costs of building those structures were enormous, and by 1970 or so hydrogen bombs had become powerful enough and ICBMs accurate enough that it was pretty much impossible to build something that would survive a direct hit. Once that point is reached the only protection that the site has is its secrecy, and it costs the enemy less to hire spies and launch satellites than it does to build a new mountain. It's a losing race.
Facilities like these are a remnant of the civil-defense mentality of the 1950s. When the weapons were Hiroshima-style atomic bombs and the guidance systems were a guy 20,000 feet up looking down a bombsight, it was possible to build buildings that could survive an attack. Once you have hydrogen bombs and reasonably sophisticated inertial guidance systems, though, that possibility evaporates.
"impossible to build something that would survive a direct hit."
The Soviets had versions of the their enormous SS-18/R-36 missile with a single 25Mt warhead - these were presumably aimed at hardened sites like NORAD and Raven Rock:
They're of course within their rights to do so, but it's sad to think that all the work needed for the facility went to waste and its employees were laid off just because someone wrote an article on it.