After 50 years as the FBI’s main headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. is closing permanently, Director Kash Patel announced Friday.
“We finalized a plan to permanently close the FBI’s Hoover headquarters and move the workforce into a safe, modern facility,” Patel said in a post on X.
He didn’t state the exact date the building will close and when FBI employees will move into its new offices.
The agency had announced in July that it would abandon the Hoover building and move to the Ronald Reagan Building, just a few blocks away at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Patel noted in his post that when President Donald Trump’s administration came into office in January, “taxpayers were about to be on the hook for nearly $5 billion for a new headquarters that wouldn’t open until 2035. We scrapped that plan. Instead, we selected the already-existing Reagan Building, saving billions and allowing the transition to begin immediately with required safety and infrastructure upgrades already underway.”
His said that most of the FBI headquarters’ employees will be in the Reagan Building and “the rest are continuing in our ongoing push to put more manpower in the field, where they will remain.”
In November, Maryland leaders sued the Trump administration after it scrapped plans to move the bureau’s headquarters to Greenbelt and opted instead to keep it in Downtown D.C.
Maryland leaders criticized White House officials for ignoring the site selection process of Congress and the General Services Administration when it chose to remain in D.C. The lawsuit also pointed out that Congress had already appropriated funds for the Greenbelt relocation.
When the move to the Reagan Building was announced over the summer, critics maintained that it would not meet the security demands needed for the FBI. Patel said the agency is working on the building to ensure it has the required safety and infrastructure upgrades.
The Reagan Building is connected to the International Trade Center, and already houses some federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as well as several non-government businesses.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building was designed in the brutalist style popular in the 1960s when it was conceived and constructed. It was criticized for not conforming to the style of other federal buildings, and Hoover himself called it “the greatest monstrosity ever constructed in the history of Washington.” It was completed in 1975, and President Richard Nixon named it after the longtime FBI director after Hoover’s death in 1972.
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