FBI Director Kash Patel declared that his agency is ditching its longtime headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC, and transferring 1,500 employees to other locations across the country, calling the complex “unsafe.”
In a Friday interview with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, Patel made the surprise announcement:
“I didn’t know that I was going to do this, but I’m going to announce on your show anyway, this FBI is leaving the Hoover building because this building is unsafe for our workforce,” he said, sitting next to Deputy Director Dan Bongino. “But 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.”
While Patel did not expand on what was “unsafe” about the headquarters, official reports dating back as far as 2013 found that it’s “well documented…the FBI Headquarters building has fallen into disrepair.”
The federal government has been looking for a new building for the FBI for a decade, with a battle taking place between Greenbelt, Maryland and Springfield, Virginia.
In 2023, the General Services Administration (GSA) selected a site in Greenbelt, prompting protests from state lawmakers in Virginia, according to a Government Executive report.
Trump put those plans on hold in March, however, when he announced that “we’re going to stop” the move to Greenbelt and reconstruct the FBI building “right where it is.”
Patel told Bartiromo, “Look, the FBI is 38,000 when we are fully manned, which we are not. In the national capital region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, DC, there were 11,000 FBI employees. That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here.”
“So we are taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out,” the director explained. “Every state is getting a plus-up [supplemental supply of agents]. 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.’”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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