FBI announces move to new D.C. headquarters

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has selected a new headquarters building in Washington, D.C., after nearly two decades of failed attempts to find a permanent new space, the Bureau announced on Tuesday.

The FBI has been headquartered in downtown D.C. at the J. Edgar Hoover building since 1975 but structural problems have plagued the building for the last 20 years, leading to redevelopment and relocation projects that until Thursday had not successfully been resolved.

“This is a historic moment for the FBI,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement, adding he is “ushering FBI Headquarters into a new era and providing our agents of justice a safer place to work.”

The Bureau and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) selected the Ronald Reagan Building, blocks away from the Hoover building, as the new location. It was home to the U.S. Agency for International Development until this year, when the Trump administration consolidated USAID into the State Department and allowed Customs and Border Protection to take over the building’s lease.

“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,” Patel continued.

It is unclear when the FBI will begin its transition out of the Hoover building. 

In a March speech at the Justice Department, President Trump said his administration is “going to build another big FBI building right where it is, which would have been the right place, because the FBI and the DOJ have to be near each other.”

“They were going to build an FBI headquarters three hours away in Maryland, a liberal state,” Mr. Trump said, adding that the state’s political leadership had “no bearing” on his decision to cancel a previous Biden administration plan to move the headquarters to Maryland.

During his first term, Mr. Trump abandoned a plan to move the FBI to one of three locations in Maryland or Virginia, instead proposing a smaller headquarters in Washington to replace the Hoover building.

Under the Biden administration in 2023, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) chose a site in Greenbelt, Maryland, to serve as the new location for the FBI headquarters. The decision came after a 15-year debate on whether the headquarters should be relocated to Maryland or Virginia. 

In May, Patel told Congress his goal is to move about 10% of the Bureau’s Washington workforce — about 1,500 people — away from the D.C. area and redeploy them across the country, including a sizable number of personnel at the FBI’s facility in Huntsville, Alabama. 

In an interview with Fox News the same month, Patel called the Hoover building “unsafe for our workforce.”