Citing Funding Woes, Feds Cancel Plans For New FBI Headquarters

After months of lobbying by Maryland and local officials to be the new consolidated home of the FBI, the federal government is putting the kibosh on the project.

The federal government is canceling the decade-long project.

The General Services Agency said does not have enough money to move forward with the plans. The Obama administration had sought $1.4 billion for the project, but Congress left it underfunded by about $882 million. The Washington Post first reported the news Monday evening

“Moving forward without full funding puts the government at risk for cost escalations” and a reduction in the value of the current property, the GSA said in a statement. “The cancellation of the project does not lessen the need for a new FBI headquarters. GSA and FBI will continue to work together to address the space requirements of the FBI.”

Greenbelt and Landover, both in Prince George's County, were candidates for the new site, as was Springfield, Va. Prior to this week, the GSA was waiting on the rest of the funding to be secured before making its selection official.

Sen. Ben Cardin said Congress always had the intent to provide the rest of the money, and that was made clear in the appropriations process earlier this year.

"Congress authorized the project, funded the project, it's the responsibility of the administration to carry out that policy," Cardin said.

In fact, Sen. Chris Van Hollen said, the decision would all the money spent on the project so far while keeping FBI employees in disparate offices around the Washington area, with many still in an outmoded headquarters.

"This decision does not make sense for the American people," Van Hollen said. "I don't know what was behind it."

The hulking J. Edgar Hoover building overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue has long been the government building everyone loves to hate. The FBI has complained that the blocky, concrete building -- named for the agency’s first and longest-serving director -- is obsolete, inefficient and no longer meets the needs of an organization that has grown dramatically in the last 40 years. Those findings were confirmed by a 2011 Government Accountability Office report that agreed the building didn’t meet the agency’s long-term security needs.

The FBI had been pushing to move thousands of employees spread among leased annexes in the region into a secure consolidated headquarters that would fit with an agency whose focus has evolved to intelligence and counterterrorism.

Local and federal officials in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. had been intensely jockeying for the new facility, which would have been a massive economic development project with the potential to bring thousands of jobs, expand the tax base and boost area retail and service industries.

Gov. Larry Hogan said the state had won on all the merits and was ready to put up $300 million to help make the project happen.

"It's extremely frustrating and I'm frustrated with our leaders in Congress and I'm frustrated with the administration's position but it's not surprising," Hogan told reporters at an event in Gaithersburg. "It seems like typical Washington."

"You have the money right now to move forward with... building an FBI building," Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker said. "We have done all that we can at the county level. We have done all that we can at the state level."

Greenbelt Mayor Emmett Jordan was holding out hope that the government would reconsider.

"All these delays, all these years really have had a chilling effect," he said. Jordan said Greenbelt could have moved on to other options had the city known sooner. "How's local government supposed to function when the federal government can't follow through on its commitment?"

In Virginia, local officials had hoped to lure the FBI to redevelop an antiquated GSA warehouse that now sits on a prime piece of real estate near the Springfield Metro station.

Brian Coy, spokesman for Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said, "it's a shame that the dysfunction of the Trump administration killed this project and will likely make it harder for the FBI to do its job."

But District of Columbia Councilmember Jack Evans said the proposed plans to relocate the headquarters have been unworkable for years.

“I applaud the fact that somebody pulled the plug,” Evans said in a telephone conversation Monday evening.

Evans said he sees no reason to send the headquarters outside of the city, which has other locations that could work. He says he hopes the government will move quickly to identify a site for the headquarters in the city.

“I see no reason to ship it out to the outer regions,” Evans said of plans to move to Virginia or Maryland. “Nobody wants to go out there” he said of the proposed sites in those states.

Members of the state's congressional delegation who represent Greenbelt and Landover, however, were less than pleased. In a joint statement, Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Rep. Anthony Brown said that canceling the plan puts national security at risk,

“Congress has spoken very clearly on multiple occasions that it intends to fully fund the consolidated FBI project. The State of Maryland and Prince George’s County have invested immense resources and time into this project," the congressmen said. "But for the Administration, after failing to include any funding in the President’s FY18 budget request, to pull the plug on this procurement precipitously before the FY18 Appropriations process is even halfway complete, is a waste of hundreds of millions of federal, state and local taxpayer dollars."

They urged the GSA to select another financing mechanism to see that a new FBI headquarters does get built.

Gov. Larry Hogan has not yet commented.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.