President Trump said he will stop the FBI’s plan to move out of its massive downtown Washington headquarters and relocate to suburban Maryland, pledging to keep the law enforcement agency in the nation’s capital.
“We’re going to stop. We’re not going to let it happen,” Mr. Trump said in remarks Friday at the Department of Justice.
The president condemned the plan to build a new FBI headquarters on a 61-acre plot near the Metro station in Greenbelt. He complained that the Greenbelt location was too far from the Justice Department’s headquarters and the bureau needs to remain downtown to help reduce crime.
“We’re going to build another big FBI building right here, which would have been the right thing to do because the FBI and DOJ have to be near each other,” Mr. Trump said.
“We like to have law enforcement walking the streets of the capital because when the bad guys are out there and they see there’s an FBI agent — that’s the ultimate in law enforcement — they’re not going to be acting so bad,” he continued.
Mr. Trump said FBI Director Kash Patel is eyeing a former Commerce Department building in Washington that is roughly a quarter of the size of the current headquarters, saying it would hold “far fewer people.” Since taking office last month, Mr. Trump has been determined to reduce the size of government through layoffs, canceling spending plans and shuttering departments.
He said Mr. Patel wants to sell the parcel where the FBI headquarters sits because the bureau doesn’t need the space it currently occupies.
The president did not say if he would prefer building a new FBI headquarters on the same parcel across the street from the Justice Department, which he championed during his first term, or would back Mr. Patel’s idea to move the agency to the former Commerce Department building.
The FBI is headquartered in the massive J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, which it has called home since 1975. It sits across the street from the Justice Department, which oversees the bureau’s operations.
Critics, including former FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, have long complained that the Hoover Building is outdated and too small to house the bureau’s 11,000 workers.
The FBI under Mr. Trump, however, is moving hundreds of agents out of the Washington headquarters and into field offices across the country as well as to its office in Huntsville, Alabama.
Under the plan to move the FBI announced in November 2023, the FBI would serve as the key tenant in a proposed Greenbelt development that would include apartments, hotel and retail space. The new headquarters would be a suburban campus and construction would be funded by Congress, which could take months or even years to approve. A developer for the project has not been selected.
The Biden administration touted the proposal as part of its effort to invest in minority communities.
Several House Republicans had threatened to put the project in limbo, pledging to defund it over what they call the bureau’s partisanship, most especially its investigations into Mr. Trump.
The FBI has ping-ponged for more than a decade between tearing down the Hoover building and constructing a modern facility on the same site or building a campus-style headquarters in the suburbs.
Potential site selection plans were moving forward under an agreement for the FBI to swap the Hoover Building’s valuable downtown Washington parcel with a developer that would fund the suburban headquarters as part of the exchange.
However, the FBI nixed the swap in July 2017 under the first Trump administration, citing cost concerns, and pushed to demolish the Hoover Building and build a new facility on the same site.
The reversal sparked accusations from House Democrats that Mr. Trump nixed the project to stop a developer from building a hotel near his Trump International Hotel, just a short walk from the FBI.
In 2018, a group of Democrats sent a letter to the General Services Administration charging that Mr. Trump scrapped the relocation plan to “prevent Trump Hotel competitors from acquiring the land.”
“He should not have played any role in a determination that bears directly on his own financial interests with the Trump hotel,” wrote the Democrats, led by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, who died in 2019.
Once Mr. Trump left office, lawmakers in Maryland and Virginia lobbied to include funding in the 2022 federal budget for a suburban headquarters.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General in 2023 cleared Mr. Trump of any wrongdoing, saying his interests had nothing to do with the FBI’s new relocation plans, which were made independently by Mr. Wray.
“Specifically, we found no evidence that in making the decision to seek to have the new FBI headquarters remain at its current [downtown] site, Director Wray and others at the FBI considered the location of the then-named Trump International Hotel or how President Trump’s financial interests could be impacted by the decision,” the inspector general report said.
The inspector general said Mr. Wray’s preference to keep the FBI in downtown Washington and build a new facility on the same site was based on several factors: its proximity to the Justice Department and White House; its ability to keep it secure; and the expansion of the FBI’s Huntsville site, reducing the need for a massive complex in Maryland or Virginia.
“We found that Wray testified credibly about how he reached the decision independently and not as the result of any external pressure or influence,” the report said, adding “other FBI witnesses’ testimony” confirmed Mr. Wray’s account.
