(Photo by Beau Finley)

(Photo by Beau Finley)

Five years worth of work is being tossed out the boxy, Brutalist windows of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

The government is cancelling the search for new FBI headquarters, the General Services Administration said in a statement today. The plan was to swap the crumbling downtown building for a larger site that could accommodate the agency’s entire workforce. But a huge funding gap “puts the government at risk for cost escalations and the potential reduction in value of the J. Edgar Hoover property that developers were to receive as part of this procurement.”

The Government Accountability Office declared the building “functionally obsolete” back in 2011, when the staff had already spread out to 22 different facilities sprawled across the region. The following year, the GSA kicked off a search to swap the huge and extremely valuable property in the heart of downtown D.C. for a larger, consolidated campus elsewhere in the region.

Then-mayor Vincent Gray proposed Poplar Point, but D.C. didn’t make the shortlist announced in 2014. The three finalists were in Springfield, Virginia and Greenbelt and Landover in Maryland.

While Prince George’s and Fairfax counties continued to make their cases, the District still had reason to celebrate: 6.7 acres of prime downtown land would be freed up. “The opportunity to redevelop the Hoover Building site is an occasion for joyful anticipation and for getting to work on the further transformation of Pennsylvania Avenue,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said at the time.

Things were so far along that the National Capital Planning Commission even started hosting meetings last year to decide the future of the downtown site.

But the Donald Trump administration brought the record to a screeching halt. After already underfunding the project by hundreds of millions of dollars, a House subcommittee last month proposed stripping another $200 million last month. The GSA said today that the yawning funding makes the project untenable.

“Now all the bidders will head home having nothing to show for their years designing, pricing and financing what might have been the largest government development since the CIA moved to Langley in Northern Virginia in 1961,” as The Washington Post notes.

Meanwhile, the FBI’s workforce will continue to be stretched across a dilapidated headquarters and a slew of other buildings. The GSA is well aware of the problems. They write: “The cancellation of the project does not lessen the need for a new FBI headquarters.”

Filed Under: brutal, brutalist, fbi, fbi building, gsa, j. edgar hoover building,