The Trump administration will move the FBI headquarters from the storied Brutalist-era J. Edgar Hoover building to the Ronald Reagan Building blocks away, it said Tuesday.
The announcement comes the same date that the US Agency for International Development — which had been housed in the Reagan building — was officially absorbed into the State Department andceased to operate.
The Hoover building has long been in need of drastic repairs, and measures, including large nets installed to keep crumbling infrastructure from falling on people, have been installed in recent years. But the question of where to move the FBI has been a long political fight.
FBI Director Kash Patel said that “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.”
The decision is a change from yearslong discussions to build a new FBI headquarters just outside of Washington, DC, in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“Previous efforts focused on constructing a new suburban campus, which would have cost the taxpayers billions of dollars and would have taken years to construct,” the FBI said in a statement Tuesday announcing the move.
Democratic lawmakers immediately said they plan to fight the switch, saying the plan to move to Greenbelt was already final and the money was appropriated.
The Reagan building will be shared with other agencies including Customs and Border Protection and others.