Federal officials have decided the FBI will leave its iconic but decaying headquarters in downtown Washington for the Maryland suburbs, multiple people familiar with the decision said Wednesday. The move follows years of pointed arguments about where the multibillion-dollar project should land.
But the decision to build the massive project in Prince George’s County won’t necessarily end the debate. The FBI has raised concerns about the site-selection process in recent months, according to a person familiar with the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. The person declined to further describe the concerns. An FBI spokeswoman referred questions to the General Services Administration, the federal agency overseeing the process.
The headquarters complex would be built on an empty 61-acre plot outside the Greenbelt Metro station — the marquee tenant in a proposed mixed-use development site that would include apartments, a hotel and retail and could bring billions of dollars of new tax revenue to the county.
Maryland leaders had pitched Greenbelt in Prince George’s, a majority-Black county just outside the nation’s capital, as a Metro-accessible site that would deliver on President Biden’s promise to invest in historically underfunded communities. Local officials in Virginia and D.C. had also lobbied hard for the project, viewed as a crown jewel for its associated jobs, prestige and economic development.
