This week, after more than a decade of debate, government officials chose a site for a new FBI headquarters, replacing the J. Edgar Hoover Building that has stood in downtown Washington, DC, since the 1970s. The new building, which will be located in Maryland, will house thousands of officers and is expected to cost billions.
The government has long advocated for a new building, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noting in 2011 that the Hoover Building was “approaching life cycle age and showing signs of deterioration” and “[es] do not fully support the FBI’s long-term requirements for security, space, and building conditions.”
A much more budget-conscious solution, which lawmakers don’t seem to have considered, would be to simply reduce the size of the FBI.
FBI officials wanted to keep the building in Washington, citing its proximity to both the White House and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The agency even proposed building a secondary facility in Maryland or Virginia, which would serve as a “command center for cyber operations.” But lawmakers from those states were unswayed, adding language to a 2022 spending bill directing the General Services Administration (GSA) to choose a new headquarters from three options: Greenbelt, Maryland; Landover, Maryland; and Springfield, Va.
On Thursday, the GSA announced it had chosen Greenbelt, where it would build a new facility next to a smaller facility in downtown Washington that could house up to 1,000 agents. The GSA noted that the Greenbelt location is very close to a Metro stop and would entail the cheapest and fastest timeline for acquisition and construction.
Each of the proposed sites had problems: According to an October DOJ inspector general report, the FBI was “concerned” that the Greenbelt site was “half wetlands and that the amount of buildable space was far less than anticipated when the location was selected.” The Springfield location, while the easiest to access the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia, “had multiple government agencies … that had to be relocated, which the FBI said was costly, time-consuming and logistically would be complicated.” FBI officials found all three options lacking, but preferred the Landover location even though it had “the worst access to public transportation,” the DOJ report said.
Regardless of location, the new headquarters won’t come cheap: In its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, the DOJ asked Congress for $3.5 billion for the new building, which it said would house “at least 7,500 staff.”
But as lawmakers and government agencies have argued over where to house these many employees, they have largely ignored the fact that they could simply shrink the FBI’s footprint.
Proponents of a new facility say the Hoover Building is too small to house the size of the current FBI. In a 2011 response to a GAO report, FBI Deputy Director Thomas Harrington noted that the building “houses only 52% of the headquarters workforce, with the remainder located in 21 offsite leased locations.” Plans for the new headquarters call it a “consolidation” effort intended to bring nearly all agents under one roof.
It’s not clear that the FBI even needs that many agents. From its founding in 1908 until the opening of the Hoover Building in 1975, the FBI operated in the DOJ building. During that time, it mainly enforced interstate crimes such as bank fraud or forced labor.
Over time, the agency’s mandate has increased dramatically – and excessively. “When the FBI first occupied the Hoover Building, it was primarily a law enforcement organization,” said the 2011 GAO report. “Since then, its mission has grown in response to evolving threats and now includes counterterrorism, counterintelligence, deterrence of weapons of mass destruction and cyber security.” As the scope of federal law enforcement has expanded, especially since September 11, so have federal agencies.
Lawmakers have fought for more than a decade over whether to consolidate the FBI’s massive workforce into a multibillion-dollar facility in Maryland or Virginia. They should have been thinking about a completely different issue: how to downsize the expensive and expansive agency.