FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday morning confirmed that the FBI is leaving its Washington headquarters, known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building, due to safety reasons, and that about 1,500 FBI employees will be relocated to locations around the United States.
“I didn’t know I was going to do this, but I’m going to announce it on your show anyway: This FBI is leaving the Hoover Building,” Patel said. “Because this building is unsafe for our workforce. We want the American men and women to know, if you’re going to come work at the premier law enforcement agency in the world, we’re going to give you a building that’s commensurate with that, and that’s not this place.”
The FBI also said he wants to lower the number of FBI employees in Washington and move them to work in other jurisdictions.
“Look, the FBI has 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not,” Patel told Fox News on Friday. “In the national capital region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C., there were 11,000 FBI employees. That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here, so we’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.”
Patel said that every state will be getting more FBI agents because it will “inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say, ‘We want to work at the FBI because we want to fight violent crime and we want to be sent out into the country to do it.’”
“In the next three, six, [and] nine months, we’re going to be doing that hard,” he said.
Patel did not provide more details regarding the safety concerns around the Hoover building.
But at the time, the General Services Administration (GSA) said it “has decided to limit investments in the Hoover Building to those necessary to protect health and safety and keep building systems functioning while GSA assesses the FBI’s facility needs. This decision increases the potential for building system failures and disruption to the FBI’s operations.”
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump said he would halt plans to relocate the FBI’s headquarters from Washington to Maryland.
“They were going to build an FBI headquarters three hours away in Maryland, a liberal state, but that has no bearing on what I’m about to say,” Trump told reporters at a White House news conference in March. “But we’re going to stop it, not going to let that happen.”
Trump then previewed a plan to construct another FBI building next to the Hoover building, which he said at the time “would have been the right place because the FBI and the DOJ [Department of Justice] have to be near each other.”
The desire to move the FBI headquarters has been suggested by Patel for months. About a year before he was confirmed as FBI director, he said that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover building on Day 1” and re-open it as a “museum of the deep state.”
