FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday announced plans to move the bureau out of its headquarters in Washington, D.C.
As part of the plan to vacate its headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the bureau will transfer 1,500 employees to varying locations nationwide. The building, which is located on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, has served as the FBI’s headquarters since 1975.
“This FBI is leaving the Hoover building because this building is unsafe for our workforce,” Patel said during an appearance on Fox News. “We want the American men and women to know if you’re going to come work at the premier law enforcement agency in the world, we’re going to give you a building that’s commensurate with that, and that’s not this place.”
Patel did not go into detail about the aforementioned safety concerns, nor did he say when exactly the bureau will leave its longtime HQ.
The FBI director noted the agency has 11,000 FBI employees in the 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C.
“That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here,” Patel said.
“So we are taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out. Every state is getting a plus-up. And I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say we want to work at the FBI because we want to fight violent crime and we want to be sent out into the country to do it,” he said.
Where the FBI should build a new headquarters has been a question for years. In 2016, the General Services Administration submitted a prospectus to Congress for the construction of a new facility. That prospectus came just one year after the Washington Post reported that the headquarters was “crumbling.” At the time, the GSA identified three potential locations for a new facility: Greenbelt and Landover in Maryland, and Springfield, Va.
The GSA canceled the project one year later, after finding the process would cost roughly $1.4 billion and Congress had only appropriated $523 million.
Congress reopened the conversation in 2022 when it instructed the GSA to select one of the three sites “in as expeditious [a] manner as possible.”
The GSA announced in 2023 it had “determined Greenbelt to be the best option for the FBI and the United States government because the site was the lowest cost to taxpayers, provided the greatest transportation access to FBI employees and visitors, and gave the government the most certainty on project delivery schedule. It also provided the highest potential to advance sustainability and equity.”
However, that decision was met with controversy. Virginia lawmakers issued a joint statement saying they were “deeply disturbed to learn that a political appointee at the General Services Administration overruled the unanimous recommendation of a three-person panel comprised of career experts from the GSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluding that Springfield, Virginia is the site best suited for the new FBI headquarters.”
The concerns around a potential conflict of interest led a federal watchdog to open an investigation into how the site was chosen.
In March, President Trump said he planned to cancel the bureau’s move to Greenbelt.
“They were going to build an FBI headquarters three hours away in Maryland, a liberal state, but that has no bearing on what I’m about to say,” he said. “But we’re going to stop it, not going to let that happen. We’re going to build another big FBI building right where it is, which would have been the right place because the FBI and the DOJ [Department of Justice] have to be near each other.”