By Steve Neavling
Maryland leaders are vowing to fight the Trump administration’s plan to relocate the FBI’s headquarters to a shared federal building in downtown Washington, a move they say undermines years of bipartisan work to build a secure, standalone facility in Prince George’s County, The Washington Post reports.
“I’ve been at this a long time, and we’re not giving up yet,” Rep. Steny H. Hoyer said Wednesday. “It’s still a long way to go before the FBI moves into the Reagan building. They just can’t do it on their own.”
On Tuesday, the administration announced plans to move the FBI from the aging J. Edgar Hoover building to the nearby Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, a decision that would scuttle a long-planned relocation to Greenbelt, Md., and deliver a blow to an economically struggling Black-majority community.
The move still requires congressional approval and funding — leverage that Maryland lawmakers are preparing to use. Hoyer, along with Rep. Glenn Ivey and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, sits on key appropriations committees that oversee funding for the FBI and the General Services Administration, which manages federal properties.
Van Hollen, who chairs the Senate subcommittee responsible for the FBI’s budget, has already rejected the administration’s request to repurpose $555 million previously earmarked for the Greenbelt site.
“Congress has the power of the purse and it can control other funds for the FBI,” Van Hollen said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday. “And so we will be trying to work on a bipartisan basis to make sure that this programming request is not acceptable because a new site does not meet the safety requirement for the men and women of the FBI nor does that meet the mission needs.”
Maryland officials also criticized the Reagan building as a poor fit for the bureau’s security needs. The planned Greenbelt complex would have met the same security standards as CIA headquarters, while the Reagan building is shared with restaurants, a museum, and other public tenants on a busy stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue.
“All of the things that Mueller identified are truer today than they were when Mueller raised them,” Hoyer said. “What seems to me to be irrational is they want to move it to a building where the FBI will be a tenant, along with a lot of other tenants, obviously undermining the security and integrity by being in building that is not designed for the FBI.”
The FBI and GSA have argued the move would save billions compared with new construction and avoid over $300 million in deferred maintenance at the Hoover building. But local officials, including those in Prince George’s County, said they are reviewing legal options to challenge the decision. The Maryland attorney general’s office declined to say whether it would take legal action.
The FBI is expected to brief congressional appropriators on the plan next week.
