With a new administration in the White House, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is renewing the fight to relocate the FBI headquarters from Pennsylvania Avenue to Prince George’s County.
“While Maryland is already home to a significant number of FBI employees, we are prepared to advance the infrastructure necessary to accommodate an influx of federal workers,” Hogan wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday.
This isn’t the first time a state official has pushed to get the FBI to relocate to Maryland. In December, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) continued his effort to get the General Services Administration, which manages the government’s real estate, and the FBI to submit a proposal for a fully-consolidated headquarters in one of the three locations, two of which are in Prince George’s County. The other is in Fairfax County, Virginia.
“Following the Trump Administration’s stonewalling of the new, safer FBI headquarters that will appropriately meet the needs of the Bureau, Van Hollen looks forward to pushing for renewed progress under the incoming Biden Administration,” read a statement on the senator’s website.
Virginia and District officials are also reasserting themselves on the historic building’s fate. A spokesperson for Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) told the Washington Business Journal in November that the Biden administration “should pick up where the Obama administration left off and continue a fair and thorough review process at GSA to plan for a new site.”
D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) told the publication that she would support a prospectus being completed on the three locations, but she said she didn’t have a preference on where the new location should be.
A 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office deemed the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building “functionally obsolete” and not supportive of “the FBI’s long-term security, space, and building condition requirements.” And yet, other than Congress appropriating $1 billion for the project, there’s been no movement from any of the federal agencies to raze the building and relocate to a D.C.-area suburb.
Dan Matthews, the head of the General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service, said that there wasn’t enough funding to execute the FBI HQ relocation that the Obama administration had planned because of a flaw strategy to exchange the Hoover Building with a developer that would build the suburban headquarters, according to Bisnow.
“There was a massive shortfall between the expected value of the exchange, what Congress had appropriated and what a new headquarters would cost,” Matthews said.
In February 2018, the GSA projected the cost around $3.57 billion to rebuild the headquarters in one of D.C.’s suburbs.
But the plan took an even more significant hit under former president Trump, who proposed instead that the Hoover Building be demolished and a new FBI HQ be built in its place. That prompted claims that Trump was seeking to keep a government building at the site to prevent any competition to his hotel only blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Dominique Maria Bonessi