FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau is leaving its longtime DC headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building and transferring 1,500 employees to locations around the country.
“This FBI is leaving the [J. Edgar] Hoover Building because this building is unsafe for our workforce,” Patel told Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo in an interview set to air on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“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,” the FBI chief added.
Patel did not specify what safety hazards are posed by the massive brutalist structure on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol — though the building is draped with nets to prevent chunks of concrete from falling onto passersby.
He also did not share a timeframe for the move or the bureau’s new headquarters location.
The Hoover Building was completed in 1975 after more than a decade of construction and occupies a block of prime real estate — prompting President Trump to muse about redevelopment for years.
In 2013, before entering politics, the now-78-year-old considered acquiring it from the government for a private project in exchange for building a new FBI office elsewhere.
In 2018, during his first presidential term, Trump made clear he loathed the edifice and would be glad to see it go.
“It’s one of the brutalist-type buildings, you know, brutalist architecture. Honestly, I think it’s one of the ugliest buildings in the city,” he said.
Trump hinted in March of this year that his administration was “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.”
At the same time, Trump blocked a Biden-era plan to move the headquarters to Greenbelt, Md., after an inspector general’s report faulted the selection process, which passed over a rival site in Springfield, Va.
A three-person selection panel had picked the Springfield site, but were overruled by a General Services Administration official who formerly worked for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), which owned the Greenbelt site
“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,” Patel told Bartiromo.389
“So we are taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out. 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.’”
He added: “in the next three, six, nine months we’re going to be doing that hard.”