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For more than a decade, a bipartisan contingent of political leaders from Maryland and Virginia sought the FBI’s new headquarters.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building, a brutalist complex near the White House that has housed the agency’s headquarters since 1975, became functionally obsolete years ago, with workers scattered elsewhere in the area. The current location, while centrally located, also has security vulnerabilities that a newer, more secure facility would fix.
For years, the race to get the installation was intense. But last November federal officials chose a site in Greenbelt, Maryland, located in suburban Prince George’s County and adjacent to an existing subway station, making it readily available for public transportation.
The resolution is a primary victory for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Maryland Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, but especially for Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer, dean of Maryland’s congressional delegation and a veteran of the project. In an interview, he told me that he first discussed the resolution in 2009 with Robert Mueller, then director of the FBI.
“I walked up to the building, looked at it, walked around and he showed me how decrepit it was,” Hoyer said, noting that Mueller said the state of the building hurt the agency’s efficiency.
Hoyer, a former House majority leader who supported Moore’s crusade months before the 2022 Democratic gubernatorial primary, told Business Insider that the current governor “immediately took advantage” of the FBI factor even before his final primary victory.
“He assimilated and understood the importance of our competitive merit and focused on achieving that goal,” Hoyer said. “And he identified the importance of the FBI to Maryland and especially to Prince George’s County. “
Prince George’s County, the majority-black county directly east of Washington, D. C. , has for years had one of the wealthiest black populations of any jurisdiction in the country. But compared to Northern Virginia communities like Fairfax County, which has been an economic powerhouse for decades, Prince George’s County hasn’t enjoyed a similar point of economic development.
In that sense, the new construction, which will house roughly 11,000 workers under one roof, is a game-changer for Maryland.
“We own four percent of the federal leased land in Prince George’s County,” Hoyer told me, while noting that the county is home to about 20 percent of the federal staff in the Washington area. “Fairfax County has 11 percent of the space, which is about 3 times more than we do. “
Hoyer, like Moore, argued that a site in Maryland would be tied to equity, not only in terms of race, but also in terms of federal investment.
“This project will be worth over $4 billion in economic activity and it’s going to solidify Maryland as the cyber capital of this country,” the governor told me in a recent interview. “The reason that we made it such a high priority is because this is going to be one of the most important federal buildings that has ever been built.”
Virginia leaders, who for years argued that a suburban site near the Marine Corps Base Quantico was a better fit for the headquarters, have criticized the selection — and now the General Service Administration will conduct an evaluation of the process.
In a November letter, a majority of Virginia’s congressional delegation asked that the decision to move the headquarters to the 61-acre Greenbelt site be reversed. And current FBI director Christopher Wray has expressed concerns about the selection process.
But in November, a White House spokesperson defended the variety procedure as “fair and transparent. “And Maryland’s leaders remain confident.
“We’re probably convinced that everything was done correctly,” Hoyer told me. “And I was convinced from the beginning that Greenbelt was by far the most productive site for all the reasons that the GSA finally came up with. “