F.B.I. Moving Into Building That Housed U.S.A.I.D.

New York Times

3 days ago

The F.B.I. said on Monday that it would leave its crumbling headquarters and move into a nearby building vacated by the U.S. Agency for International Development, keeping the bureau in downtown Washington.
The decision to decamp to the Ronald Reagan Building potentially ends years of jockeying by legislators to relocate the country's premier law enforcement agency — and possibly thousands of federal employees — to a suburban location in either Maryland or Virginia.
The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, hailed the cost savings of moving his agency's headquarters down the street after the White House proposed cutting the bureau's budget by about half a billion dollars, putting it on a spending level last seen in 2011. The announcement was short on details, including when the move would begin and the overall cost.
'We are ushering F.B.I. headquarters into a new era and providing our agents of justice a safer place to work,' Mr. Patel said in a statement. 'Moving to the Ronald Reagan Building is the most cost-effective and resource-efficient way to carry out our mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.'
Michael Peters, the public buildings service commissioner at the General Services Administration, which oversees federal real estate, said the repurposing of the U.S.A.I.D. headquarters would save billions of dollars on new construction and more than $300 million in deferred maintenance costs at the old F.B.I. building.
As part of President Trump's efforts to overhaul the federal government, the global aid agency was gutted and its headquarters emptied earlier this year in a tumultuous series of events that dismantled an institution established more than a half century ago as a linchpin of U.S. foreign policy.
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