The Federal Bureau of Investigation is moving out of its out-dated headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., but the question now is where will it go?
Congress allocated $390 million for the intelligence agency to begin building a new headquarters in suburban D.C. as part of the omnibus spending bill announced early Wednesday morning.
While the agency is still in the early stages of the move, it has narrowed its search down to three possible new locations, two located in Maryland and one in Virginia, The Washington Post reports.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, the leading Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has made relocating the FBI headquarters to Maryland one of her top priorities since the agency began looking for a new home three years ago.
“I’m fully behind the FBI and fully behind Prince George’s County as home to the new headquarters,” Mikulski told the Baltimore Sun. “With more than 40 percent of FBI employees already living in Maryland, Prince George’s is the right place and has the right stuff.”
According to Mikulski, the J. Edgar Hoover building is leaking and flooding, and doesn’t even meet the FBI’s security standards.
“It’s too small for the FBI’s needs, so workers are scattered across 14 leased offices impeding efficiency and effectiveness,” she said.
Mikulski and her colleagues from Maryland want to see the headquarters and the nearly 11,000 people who work there move into one of the two sites in Maryland located at either Greenbelt or Landover. The Virginia location is in Springfield, southwest of D.C.
Moving to a suburban campus may help with efficiency, but the expensive project is increasingly bringing about questions of how it will be financed.
The $390 million set aside in the spending bill is just a small fraction of the estimated $2 billion it will cost to eventually build the new headquarters, but will give the agency a starting point.
According to the proposed bill, $180 million would go to construction of the new FBI building, $135 million would be used for land acquisition and the other $75 million would pay for oversight of the project by the General Services Administration.
Most of the cost, though, would be covered by the FBI trading its expensive downtown digs for the less expensive ones in the suburbs.
The omnibus deal must still be voted on by the House and Senate, and is expected to hit the floors on Friday.
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