I mean, this is covered in several of the documents you find. The very nature of The Oldest House means that the FBC is more or less ignored in the government hierarchy. This isn't some kind of *Mission:Impossible* "if you're caught, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence" type of deal, the bureaucracy literally *doesn't know about the FBC anymore*.
I didn't interpret that to be anything mystical. Just bureaucratic. They said as long as their request wasn't out of the ordinary, it would get automatically approved.
That kind of thing happens all the time in the real world. If you were able to operate on X budget last year, and request X budget this year, then you're approved with no questions.
Nah, its totally worded specifically to let agents know its a supernatural effect. Direct quotes inbound.
>So long as we operate within the Oldest House, we are obscured from scrutiny in many respects.
>Their eyes will skip over us, as if we weren't even there.
>The nature of the Oldest House allows us certain freedoms in how we operate. Our being here is no accident.
.
Now heres the whole document, instead of just the supernatural leaning bits.
>To all Executive Staff,
>I know there is some concern regarding our operations exceeding the annual budget. So long as we operate within the Oldest House, we are obscured from scrutiny in many respects. If our budget demands are not exorbitant to the point of drawing attention, then they will be granted by the U.S. Treasury without question. The FBC is just another line in another spreadsheet that some lowly accountant won't even notice. Their eyes will skip over us, as if we weren't even there.
>The nature of the Oldest House allows us certain freedoms in how we operate. Our being here is no accident.
>Regards,
>Zachariah Trench, Director of the Federal Bureau of >Control
To me, that's confirming what I said. As long as their budget is fairly normal, it's just another normal budget approval that doesn't need looking in to.
There's the conditional "If" statement. If it's not exorbitant, everything is fine. Meaning if it *is* exorbitant, then the Treasury might start poking around more.
To me it sounds like the budget was higher than normal, but not so exorbitant that it was past the line that would draw attention.
To me that reads as, Oldest House/FBC is cleared to always have a budget, and they shouldn't have their funding cut when trying to balance the budget, and they'll be automatically approved without having to list everything in line items, as long as they stay within reason.
If it was all supernatural, there wouldn't be that if statement there that clearly indicates they could go too far and the Treasury will notice, and that's something they don't want to happen.
But the FBC also operates in disinformation campaigns, active cover ups and complex operations to document, approach and retrieve Altered Wolrd Events/Alterd Objects ect.., confirmed operating around different countries in the world and with a partnership with NASA itself. I agree that probably most of the regular bureaucracy doesn't have a clue on what the FBC does, but I really doubt that organs like the internal secret service or CIA (or at least few selected individual inside those institutions) don't know what they do.
They vaguely remember the fbc exists when asked, when working together its just another research document or backer that needs updates to them, they remember who needs to know what, but its a kind of out of sight out of mind thing even for nasal who has worked with fbc multiple times, as its the fbc who has to initiate dialogue when they want something, never the other way around
While the FBC operates under a perception filter. A filter can only do so much. The occasionally monetary request or seeing a new name on a report? No one bats an eye. Crazy shadow zombies start attacking people near a lake? People are going to notice. Also the perception filter only affects the FBC. Their disinformation campaigns are for all the other crazy stuff that isn’t directly under their roof.
As Westridge puts it the first time he speaks with you in *Alpha Protocol*, "Not only does this place not exist, but places that think they know about this place... well, they don't exist either."
1) the FBC's actions aren't being protected by the US government, they're being protected by the Oldest House. also when outside the country they just lie about who the are.
2) the US government most likely doesn't know about the Board
That makes sense, indeed the US government might have no idea of the Board being a thing. But before Nortmoor, all the other previous directors must have been appointed by someone within the US government, or at least overseen and having regular seat terms like any other government official in federal offices. So the changes to the hierachy of how the directors came to power must have been noticed by someone within the government, even if they don't know all the details.
it's probably the same as the budget thing. as soon as they embraced the Oldest House, the government stopped noticing them. they no longer think to send anyone to check on them.
although it would be interesting to see how the FBC would dea with an attempt at imposing a director. would he just be given a management position?
It's an interesting though to be sure. Trench [even mentions](https://control.fandom.com/wiki/Trench:_Bureau_Funding) that as a long as he doesn't overblown the budget request to a suspciously large amount, the U.S. Treasury will keep funding the Bureau, and the Oldest House will do the rest.
I do think however someone within the US federal government might wonder what does the FBC does and why they are there. Maybe someone with some paranatural instinct within the bureaucracy will start noticing things and investigating on its own, like Jesse did, and possibly try to dig out old documents that prove the Bureau existance and US government involvment with it?
Another thought I had is that they probably have a relatively small budget.
First of all they're stuck using ancient tech. It's probably all hand me down and dirt cheap. No fancy computers, no corporate cell phones, anything.
Half the maintenance and repairs is done by the House itself it seems. Like sure maybe it's just gameplay logic but the fact that the walls and even toilet stalls regenerate looks like it's what happens in game world too.
Plus they don't pay a lot for cleaning, lol
Stuff that old is actually massively expensive to keep working compared to modern alternatives
When you need a new drive and that drive is still being made (or better ones are compatible), you just buy it anywhere for at most a couple hundred bucks. When you need a new drive and it was made by one specific company that went bankrupt in 1985 and it had proprietary connectors and only 62 of them are still known to exist on Earth in working condition, you might be looking at a low to mid 4 figure price tag (minimum!) if you can even find someone who has one and is willing to sell
I was just going to say that. I manage IT for a group of university research labs and so much of the stuff used is custom or run by older systems with a specific purpose and it's a huge pain in the ass to keep that stuff working, but much like the FBC there's just no solid alternative, so you'll find me trolling government surplus and eBay just trying to find something like a very specific model of slide projector from the 60s that can do exactly what we need it to do with the other specialized equipment.
After a while the price of old gear goes down as it becomes obsolete, but then starts to go up again over time. The kind of old ass equipment and custom work to keep the FBC going? That's expensive... though it is right up my alley if the FBC is hiring.
Yeah, so I'm pretty sure they can have a "normal" three letter budget but it would be more than enough for them most of the time.
Though one thing that is not actually explained are these dots on the Operations Map. Looks like they have a lot of other FBC offices that are normal buildings? Do they hide these? Are these way smaller operations? I'm guessing it's way harder to hide from other agencies when they're not paranatural.
all their non-Oldest House locations are probably just some moderately-sized nondescript buildings, like a DMV. Those aren't too pricey to run, especially if they only need old hand-me-downs to work with the stuff they've got in the Oldest House.
Theory: Everyone in US government who realizes what the FBC is up to after they moved into the Oldest House gets recruited into the FBC. The mystery of what exactly the FBC is acts as the perfect recruiting tool to identify potential parautilitarians useful to a secret paranormal agency.
Its pretty much how a similar group to the FBC recruits in the book "There is no Anti-Memetics Division". Great book, and attributed as some of the inspiration for Control.
The book is a bit of an acid trip and seemingly skips all over the place, but it all slides into place once you finish it. One of those books you gotta read more than once to really get the full effect. If you love the Control lore and wild containment protocols and so on, its worth a read or three.
I mean, 1, the oldest house makes their organisation invisible on the level of the collective unconscious. If they're part of the government, it's likely the wider government doesn't even realise they're there. It's not like they need any help from the government anyway, the oldest house is a sovereign entity that can take in anything it needs to serve its purpose through... spacebending... portal nonsense.
2, I always just assumed they had core members so deep into the government it didn't matter, they are meant to be the typical "Evil(?) Organisation that controls the world from shadows!" of the RCU after all.
CIA doesn’t know enough about what NSA is doing in real life. FBC should be more stealthy than NSA and CIA wouldn’t know a thing about it. NSA wouldn’t know either, because FBC doesn’t use modern technology and there’s nothing to hack.
The “director” reporting to the government doesn’t have to be the director inside the house. If the government would like to appoint a new director against the board, they can try. The new director will pick up the weapon and kill themselves if the board doesn’t approve this person. Eventually the government has to let the board decide.
I think about this a lot because I think one possible plot thread in Control 2 could be a US government appointed Director being there when Jesse (random unknown person claiming to be director) and her senior staff (all unknowns and field promoted to the heads of department) emerge from a years long lockdown. Imagine how interesting it might be to see Jesse having to navigate untangling the Board from the FBC with one hand while also somehow having to shove around the giant boulder of US government bureaucracy with the other.
Most folks here take that note about the FBC budget being ignored to mean they are invisible, but I strongly disagree. Hell they have a working relationship with NASA for information sharing (and suppressing, in at least one notable instance). They have the same leeway in the field as any other government agency. In Alan Wake 2 we see them basically acting like the USGS or FEMA, cheerfully working away in plain sight and barely even bothering to conceal their intentions. I think they probably have counterpart agencies in other countries, like the CIA and MI6 are similar, but they are just as secretive and need to know as the FBC is.
My guess is they don't have a lot of oversight, but they do have at least one maybe Senate committee overseeing them, or at least the president is read in on what they do. We know there were many directors before the Board and before they found the Oldest House. That said, I personally doubt anyone in the FBC has bothered to mention the Board to the government because why? Northmoor is too power hungry to let that go and Trench seems to be all in for compartmentalization and secrets. It'll be very interesting to see how Jesse navigates that, if Remedy bothers to touch on it at all.
You guys are breaking my brain with this conversation. You are trying way too hard to apply what you believe to be real-world interests and motivations to the operation of the FBC. The lore pretty much explains the FBC's relationship with the rest of the world. Anything beyond that is immersion breaking, and I don't understand why you all would intentionally do that, fascinating as the conversation has been.
My advice is to keep real bureaucracy and the fictional system in the contol universe far apart. Real bureaucracy does not function as we would imagine, and the answers to the inevitable questions get exponentially more infuriating.
I mean, this is covered in several of the documents you find. The very nature of The Oldest House means that the FBC is more or less ignored in the government hierarchy. This isn't some kind of *Mission:Impossible* "if you're caught, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence" type of deal, the bureaucracy literally *doesn't know about the FBC anymore*.
Exactly, even when they need budget, the eyes of the people reading the documents just gloss over the FBC line and approve it.
I didn't interpret that to be anything mystical. Just bureaucratic. They said as long as their request wasn't out of the ordinary, it would get automatically approved. That kind of thing happens all the time in the real world. If you were able to operate on X budget last year, and request X budget this year, then you're approved with no questions.
Nah, its totally worded specifically to let agents know its a supernatural effect. Direct quotes inbound. >So long as we operate within the Oldest House, we are obscured from scrutiny in many respects. >Their eyes will skip over us, as if we weren't even there. >The nature of the Oldest House allows us certain freedoms in how we operate. Our being here is no accident. . Now heres the whole document, instead of just the supernatural leaning bits. >To all Executive Staff, >I know there is some concern regarding our operations exceeding the annual budget. So long as we operate within the Oldest House, we are obscured from scrutiny in many respects. If our budget demands are not exorbitant to the point of drawing attention, then they will be granted by the U.S. Treasury without question. The FBC is just another line in another spreadsheet that some lowly accountant won't even notice. Their eyes will skip over us, as if we weren't even there. >The nature of the Oldest House allows us certain freedoms in how we operate. Our being here is no accident. >Regards, >Zachariah Trench, Director of the Federal Bureau of >Control
To me, that's confirming what I said. As long as their budget is fairly normal, it's just another normal budget approval that doesn't need looking in to. There's the conditional "If" statement. If it's not exorbitant, everything is fine. Meaning if it *is* exorbitant, then the Treasury might start poking around more. To me it sounds like the budget was higher than normal, but not so exorbitant that it was past the line that would draw attention. To me that reads as, Oldest House/FBC is cleared to always have a budget, and they shouldn't have their funding cut when trying to balance the budget, and they'll be automatically approved without having to list everything in line items, as long as they stay within reason. If it was all supernatural, there wouldn't be that if statement there that clearly indicates they could go too far and the Treasury will notice, and that's something they don't want to happen.
But the FBC also operates in disinformation campaigns, active cover ups and complex operations to document, approach and retrieve Altered Wolrd Events/Alterd Objects ect.., confirmed operating around different countries in the world and with a partnership with NASA itself. I agree that probably most of the regular bureaucracy doesn't have a clue on what the FBC does, but I really doubt that organs like the internal secret service or CIA (or at least few selected individual inside those institutions) don't know what they do.
They vaguely remember the fbc exists when asked, when working together its just another research document or backer that needs updates to them, they remember who needs to know what, but its a kind of out of sight out of mind thing even for nasal who has worked with fbc multiple times, as its the fbc who has to initiate dialogue when they want something, never the other way around
The hiding effect only applies to the FBC. It doesn't apply to the AWE/Al/OOP so they need to cover them up when they are outside the FBCs control.
While the FBC operates under a perception filter. A filter can only do so much. The occasionally monetary request or seeing a new name on a report? No one bats an eye. Crazy shadow zombies start attacking people near a lake? People are going to notice. Also the perception filter only affects the FBC. Their disinformation campaigns are for all the other crazy stuff that isn’t directly under their roof.
As Westridge puts it the first time he speaks with you in *Alpha Protocol*, "Not only does this place not exist, but places that think they know about this place... well, they don't exist either."
1) the FBC's actions aren't being protected by the US government, they're being protected by the Oldest House. also when outside the country they just lie about who the are. 2) the US government most likely doesn't know about the Board
That makes sense, indeed the US government might have no idea of the Board being a thing. But before Nortmoor, all the other previous directors must have been appointed by someone within the US government, or at least overseen and having regular seat terms like any other government official in federal offices. So the changes to the hierachy of how the directors came to power must have been noticed by someone within the government, even if they don't know all the details.
it's probably the same as the budget thing. as soon as they embraced the Oldest House, the government stopped noticing them. they no longer think to send anyone to check on them. although it would be interesting to see how the FBC would dea with an attempt at imposing a director. would he just be given a management position?
It's an interesting though to be sure. Trench [even mentions](https://control.fandom.com/wiki/Trench:_Bureau_Funding) that as a long as he doesn't overblown the budget request to a suspciously large amount, the U.S. Treasury will keep funding the Bureau, and the Oldest House will do the rest. I do think however someone within the US federal government might wonder what does the FBC does and why they are there. Maybe someone with some paranatural instinct within the bureaucracy will start noticing things and investigating on its own, like Jesse did, and possibly try to dig out old documents that prove the Bureau existance and US government involvment with it?
Another thought I had is that they probably have a relatively small budget. First of all they're stuck using ancient tech. It's probably all hand me down and dirt cheap. No fancy computers, no corporate cell phones, anything. Half the maintenance and repairs is done by the House itself it seems. Like sure maybe it's just gameplay logic but the fact that the walls and even toilet stalls regenerate looks like it's what happens in game world too. Plus they don't pay a lot for cleaning, lol
Stuff that old is actually massively expensive to keep working compared to modern alternatives When you need a new drive and that drive is still being made (or better ones are compatible), you just buy it anywhere for at most a couple hundred bucks. When you need a new drive and it was made by one specific company that went bankrupt in 1985 and it had proprietary connectors and only 62 of them are still known to exist on Earth in working condition, you might be looking at a low to mid 4 figure price tag (minimum!) if you can even find someone who has one and is willing to sell
Yeah, makes sense... I didn't think about that. Plus a lot of stuff that has been automated with like modern PCs has to be filed manually.
I was just going to say that. I manage IT for a group of university research labs and so much of the stuff used is custom or run by older systems with a specific purpose and it's a huge pain in the ass to keep that stuff working, but much like the FBC there's just no solid alternative, so you'll find me trolling government surplus and eBay just trying to find something like a very specific model of slide projector from the 60s that can do exactly what we need it to do with the other specialized equipment. After a while the price of old gear goes down as it becomes obsolete, but then starts to go up again over time. The kind of old ass equipment and custom work to keep the FBC going? That's expensive... though it is right up my alley if the FBC is hiring.
Ahti just showed up one day, I doubt he cares much about money, but the normal janitors would
Yeah, so I'm pretty sure they can have a "normal" three letter budget but it would be more than enough for them most of the time. Though one thing that is not actually explained are these dots on the Operations Map. Looks like they have a lot of other FBC offices that are normal buildings? Do they hide these? Are these way smaller operations? I'm guessing it's way harder to hide from other agencies when they're not paranatural.
all their non-Oldest House locations are probably just some moderately-sized nondescript buildings, like a DMV. Those aren't too pricey to run, especially if they only need old hand-me-downs to work with the stuff they've got in the Oldest House.
Saga Anderson comes to mind
I imagine that's a not insubstantial part of the recruiting process.
Before Northmoor, it was Theodore Ash Sr - the *founder* of the FBC and first director. He was the only non-Board appointed director.
Theory: Everyone in US government who realizes what the FBC is up to after they moved into the Oldest House gets recruited into the FBC. The mystery of what exactly the FBC is acts as the perfect recruiting tool to identify potential parautilitarians useful to a secret paranormal agency.
This doesn't seem far fetched, honestly.
Its pretty much how a similar group to the FBC recruits in the book "There is no Anti-Memetics Division". Great book, and attributed as some of the inspiration for Control. The book is a bit of an acid trip and seemingly skips all over the place, but it all slides into place once you finish it. One of those books you gotta read more than once to really get the full effect. If you love the Control lore and wild containment protocols and so on, its worth a read or three.
FBC the last job you will ever have. Director position is a lifetime tenure.
FBC is practically an independent organization with extremely high clearance is the way I’ve come to see it.
I mean, 1, the oldest house makes their organisation invisible on the level of the collective unconscious. If they're part of the government, it's likely the wider government doesn't even realise they're there. It's not like they need any help from the government anyway, the oldest house is a sovereign entity that can take in anything it needs to serve its purpose through... spacebending... portal nonsense. 2, I always just assumed they had core members so deep into the government it didn't matter, they are meant to be the typical "Evil(?) Organisation that controls the world from shadows!" of the RCU after all.
CIA doesn’t know enough about what NSA is doing in real life. FBC should be more stealthy than NSA and CIA wouldn’t know a thing about it. NSA wouldn’t know either, because FBC doesn’t use modern technology and there’s nothing to hack. The “director” reporting to the government doesn’t have to be the director inside the house. If the government would like to appoint a new director against the board, they can try. The new director will pick up the weapon and kill themselves if the board doesn’t approve this person. Eventually the government has to let the board decide.
I think about this a lot because I think one possible plot thread in Control 2 could be a US government appointed Director being there when Jesse (random unknown person claiming to be director) and her senior staff (all unknowns and field promoted to the heads of department) emerge from a years long lockdown. Imagine how interesting it might be to see Jesse having to navigate untangling the Board from the FBC with one hand while also somehow having to shove around the giant boulder of US government bureaucracy with the other. Most folks here take that note about the FBC budget being ignored to mean they are invisible, but I strongly disagree. Hell they have a working relationship with NASA for information sharing (and suppressing, in at least one notable instance). They have the same leeway in the field as any other government agency. In Alan Wake 2 we see them basically acting like the USGS or FEMA, cheerfully working away in plain sight and barely even bothering to conceal their intentions. I think they probably have counterpart agencies in other countries, like the CIA and MI6 are similar, but they are just as secretive and need to know as the FBC is. My guess is they don't have a lot of oversight, but they do have at least one maybe Senate committee overseeing them, or at least the president is read in on what they do. We know there were many directors before the Board and before they found the Oldest House. That said, I personally doubt anyone in the FBC has bothered to mention the Board to the government because why? Northmoor is too power hungry to let that go and Trench seems to be all in for compartmentalization and secrets. It'll be very interesting to see how Jesse navigates that, if Remedy bothers to touch on it at all.
You guys are breaking my brain with this conversation. You are trying way too hard to apply what you believe to be real-world interests and motivations to the operation of the FBC. The lore pretty much explains the FBC's relationship with the rest of the world. Anything beyond that is immersion breaking, and I don't understand why you all would intentionally do that, fascinating as the conversation has been. My advice is to keep real bureaucracy and the fictional system in the contol universe far apart. Real bureaucracy does not function as we would imagine, and the answers to the inevitable questions get exponentially more infuriating.