With Donald Trump winning the presidential election, it’s far more likely that the feds’ controversial decision to put the FBI’s new headquarters in Greenbelt, a huge economic development win for Prince George’s County, will be reversed.
While it’s long been agreed the FBI’s crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building along Pennsylvania Avenue is not a suitable long-term home, President-elect Trump has never supported the idea of moving the federal law enforcement agency to the suburbs. His first administration in 2017 canceled a long-running process to do just that, and since then he’s said explicitly the FBI should remain close to the Department of Justice and a mainstay of downtown D.C., albeit in a new facility. There’s little reason to suppose he’ll change his mind.
“The new FBI building should be built in Washington, D.C., not Maryland, and be the centerpiece of my plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city,” Trump posted in May on Truth Social, a social media platform. The FBI and DOJ “have to work closely together” and so “must be in walking distance” from one another, he added in the same post.
President Joe Biden restarted the search for a suburban FBI headquarters in 2022, and in November 2023 the General Services Administration, the federal government’s civilian real estate arm, announced it had selected a site in Greenbelt, currently a huge surface parking lot next to the the eponymous Metro station, over competing sites in Landover and Springfield. The new headquarters was anticipated at the time to house 7,500 employees and support something like 3.4 million square feet of new development, including private mixed uses — a sizable addition to a local job and tax base that it’s hard to imagine many politicians would say no to.
