Scrap the New FBI Headquarters or Move It Elsewhere
While the competition between Democratic politicians in Northern Virginia and Maryland is fun to watch, this is no time to reward a corrupted agency or the DC area with a new billion-dollar HQ
It’s been nearly a decade since the General Services Administration - the federal government’s property manager - began accepting bids on a new 2.1 million square foot headquarters and complex on at least 58 acres - twice the size of the Pentagon - to replace J. Edgar Hoover building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, adjacent to the Department of Justice. The Hoover Building’s 2.4 million square foot structure contains only one million square feet of usable office space. Government planning at its best.
The estimated cost of either renovating the existing building (tearing it down and starting over) or building elsewhere is over $1 billion.
The Hoover building opened in 1975 and has long been considered downtown Washington’s ugliest edifice. One British visitor once described the Hoover building and nearby federal and private office buildings at L’Enfant Plaza (home to the Department of Energy) as “tributes to Soviet architecture.” He wasn’t wrong.
According to Wikipedia, problems with the building began to surface in 2001, around the building’s 17th birthday, and by 2006, renovation costs were estimated to reach over $1 billion. The building deteriorated as fast as it took to plan and build, a process that began during the Kennedy Administration. Thus the search for a new headquarters around 2011.
Obama Administration officials set the perimeters to exclude the possibility of moving the headquarters to West Virginia or any place else in America. It had to be located within two miles of a Washington metro rail stop within the national capital region. Three locations - two in Maryland and one in Virginia - remain the focus.
The competition is intense. Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin has teamed up with the Commonwealth’s two Democratic Senators and US Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) to push a site in Springfield, Virginia, just outside Washington’s I-495 beltway along busy I-95. Maryland’s locations include land owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transporation Authority (WMATA) near Greenbelt and the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, which strikes me as a little too cozy. Maryland’s new Democratic governor, Wes Moore, is playing the race card.
As I read the tea leaves, it seems Virginia has the inside track, but Maryland has the better locations, especially in Greenbelt. I’m guessing that most FBI headquarters personnel reside in northern Virginia. After all, disgraced former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and his Virginia Senate candidate spouse, Democratic Dr. Jill McCabe (she lost, despite massive funding via former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe), certainly do.
The other location is in Landover, Maryland, not far from where the NFL Washington Redskins Commanders currently play, at FedEx Field (they’re looking to move to Loudoun County, Virginia, again with support from Gov. Youngkin. My tax dollars at work, again).
But like noted southern California trial lawyer and conservative author and blogger Kurt Schlicter, I am asking why we are rewarding an agency noted for targeting traditional Catholics and parents who protest at school board meetings over real terrorists and criminals with a new billion-dollar building. I’m nodding in agreement with his sentiments:
The Republicans now control the House, and they have a golden opportunity to do something about the weaponization of the FBI by making a petty, mean, and absolutely essential gesture – they can defund the billion-dollar new FBI building that would replace the decaying brutalist monstrosity of a building they currently infest. No new palace for you, bums. This needs to be a line in the sand for our guys in Washington, a pass/fail test to tell us who thinks it is still the era of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and who knows what time it is. It is time to act to rein in this active threat to Our Democracy masquerading as an LEO. Republicans cannot keep up their unquestioning support of a federal agency that persecutes us in between its bouts of routine incompetence and corruption.
Yeah, yeah, I know, conservatives back the blue, except the current iteration of the FBI is not blue as in cop but blue as in Democrat catspaw. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was – long ago – a storied institution full of mob-busters, commie-busters, and generally bad people-busters. Some used to be total badasses. Now it’s a garbage force of kneeling, squealing, political hacks who use their awesome power to persecute their Dem masters’ political enemies. But let’s not forget their other failures – their crime lab that botched tons of criminal cases, or the Waco/Ruby Ridge slaughters, or the corrupt Boston field office, or Robert Hansen (perhaps the worst spy in American history), or the guy who lied on the FISA warrant, or the dude who looks like Satan who was tapping the local talent. And let’s not forget the famous pic of the hefty agent in FBI tactical gear and a freaking mask kneeling in solidarity with the communists.
Speaking as a 40+ year resident and/or frequent visitor to the nation’s capital, the last thing it needs is more bureaucrats, another traffic bottleneck, or a new federal edifice. Whether the FBI locates their $1 billion (it will be more like $2 billion when they’re done, trust me) in Virginia or Maryland, millions more will be required to expand local infrastructure, from widening an already calamitous beltway and parking for a public transportation system rife with prolific malfunctions and incompetent management.
And housing costs in the DC area are already out of sight. For what my puny, 80-year-old historic walk-up condo is worth in Arlington, Virginia, I can purchase a 3,000+ square-foot home on a half acre and a two-car garage in Oklahoma or about two dozen other states, including not-so-far-away West Virginia and parts of Pennsylvania. Charles Town, West Virginia, is about a 90-minute drive to downtown Washington, DC. Just saying. If they insist on rail access, Charles Town isn’t far from Maryland’s rapid transit system at nearby Brunswick for a speedy trip to the nation’s capital.
Heck, move to Brunswick, Maryland, maybe even Sharpsburg, where FBI agents can spend their lunch hours touring the site of the Antietam National Battlefield, the bloodiest single-day battle of the Civil War, coupled with mid-day runs or bike rides along the C&O trail. It seems many FBI agents could use a few American history lessons. And a little exercise. I’m sure Gov. Moore would be glad to assist you.
US Senator Robert C. Byrd, call your office. After all, he successfully relocated the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services function to Clarksburg, West Virginia. It’s where the National Instant Criminal Background Check program is managed.
Not all important things need to be run out of Washington, DC. Outside the beltway, you’re more likely to see things built on time and under budget. Read on:
“In January 1991, the FBI purchased 986 acres of land in Clarksburg, West Virginia, on which to construct the home of the CJIS Division. Construction started in October 1991 and was completed in July 1995, on time and under budget (emphasis added). The heart of the complex is the 500,000-square-foot main office building. Constructed in a modular design, this building is nearly the length of three football fields. It features a 600-seat cafeteria, a 500-seat auditorium, atria for visitors and employees, and a 100,000-square-foot computer center,” their website reports.
And I bet it’s cheaper to live there, or most any place in West Virginia, than in northern Virginia.
I mean no disrespect to this storied agency (armchair: too late for that). Of course, most of its rank-and-file agents are terrific professionals and unblemished by the sins of their leadership. But the 24,000-member FBI has lost its way and is pathetically led by a “company man” in one Christopher Wray, who is more vested in defending the indefensible than reforming and restoring public confidence in the agency. He would better serve his agency and the nation by protecting it from partisan weaponization, unconstitutionally anointing itself as a self-appointed truth squad, deploying dozens of agents, and giving millions of dollars to Twitter to censor speech.
John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist, recently spoke at Hillsdale University and summarized the FBI’s most recent misbehavior:
“By 2020, demands for censorship were pouring in from FBI offices all over the country, overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the government would pay Twitter $3.4 million in compensation. It was a pittance considering the work Twitter did at the government’s behest, but the payment illustrated a start reality: Twitter, a leading gatekeeper of the digital public square and arguably the most powerful social media platform in the world, had become a subcontractor for the U.S. intelligence community.”
Republicans in Congress and perhaps the next President not named Joe Biden can reset and reform this important law enforcement agency gone astray. Given modern technology, there is no reason why it has to remain within a rock’s throw of Washington’s beltway. It has 56 regional offices and responsibilities throughout the country (especially Richmond, where the infamous FBI memo targeting traditional Catholics originated. It’s been withdrawn).
I see no reason why other, less costly metro areas, from Greensboro, NC, and Knoxville, TN, to Indianapolis, IN, can't be considered. Agents living among real Americans might be liberated from the beltway’s increasingly insidious and pernicious influences. We don’t need more bureaucrats insulated from reality in or near Washington’s beltway, relying on Pravda The Washington Post as their primary source for the official narrative of news and information.
Sorry, Gov. Youngkin, but I’m playing my NIMBY card. I get your need, even your responsibility to play nice with Democrats, but maybe you can push for Winchester, Richmond, Roanoke, or Charlottesville (which has an Amtrak station with easy access to DC) under a new administration.
Make it so, Speaker McCarthy. The House has the power of the purse. Deploy it.