President Donald Trump had ditched his plans to move the FBI out of Washington, D.C., and is instead ready to house the agency in the former U.S. Agency for International Development headquarters.
The first Trump administration suggested keeping about 8,300 FBI staffers in D.C. and moving 2,300 to Alabama, Idaho and West Virginia, The Washington Post reported in 2018.
The FBI and General Services Administration have since picked the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center which is around three blocks over from its current headquarters.
The center was the headquarters of the USAID before Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, then led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, gutted the agency. It currently houses Customs and Border Protection employees and other tenants.
FBI Director Kash Patel said in an announcement of the new location on Tuesday, “This is a historic moment for the FBI.”
“Moving to the Ronald Reagan Building is the most cost effective and resource efficient way to carry out our mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution,” he said.
The FBI is currently headquartered in the J. Edgar Hoover building. Plans to relocate the agency have been ongoing for 15 years, as the current headquarters is old and crumbling.
“FBI’s existing headquarters at the Hoover building is a great example of a government building that has accumulated years of deferred maintenance, suffering from an aging water system to concrete falling off the structure,” GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian said in the FBI’s announcement.
GSA Public Buildings Service Commissioner Michael Peters said the new headquarters “not only provides a world-class location for the FBI’s public servants, but it also saves Americans billions of dollars on new construction and avoids more than $300 million in deferred maintenance costs at the J. Edgar Hoover facility.”
In 2023, the Biden administration had picked a suburb in Maryland to build the new headquarters.
The GSA said at the time that Greenbelt was chosen because it would, in part, cost taxpayers the least amount of money and provide the best transportation access for employees.
But top FBI officials favored a site in Springfield, Virginia, seeing it as better for agency needs, according to a report by The Washington Post.
Trump ripped into the Biden administration’s decision during a speech at the Justice Department this past March.
“They were going to build an FBI headquarters three hours away in Maryland, a liberal state,” he said, per Maryland Matters. “But that has no bearing on what I’m about to say. We’re going to stop it.”
