For Now, the FBI is Staying in the Brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building

For several years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has planned to leave its headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Washington, D.C.’s Pennsylvania Ave. and move to a to-be-determined suburban location. But no more. On Tuesday, the U.S. General Services Adminstration (GSA) and FBI announced that they are dropping plans to find a new home for the FBI due to a “$882 million funding gap.” The Washington Post‘s Jonathan O’Connell writes: “The decision follows years of failed attempts by federal officials to persuade Congress to fully back a plan for a campus in the Washington suburbs paid for by trading away the Hoover Building to a real estate developer and putting up nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to cover the remaining cost.”

Charles F. Murphy and Associates designed the 2-million-square-foot Brutalist structure in the 1960s. Employees began occupying the building in 1974, and it was dedicated the following year. The bureau has outgrown the space, which was designed to hold 7,090 employees, and is currently leasing additional office space, which it aimed to consolidate with a new headquarters.

“In the meantime, the FBI headquarters is crumbling,” O’Connell writes. “On a rare tour of the building in 2015, bureau officials pointed to cracked concrete, makeshift work stations in former storage areas and badly dated building systems. The officials said the structure is so inefficient that it has begun to hinder the agency’s modern mission, one increasingly focused on combating international terrorist threats and cybercrime.”

In a statement, the GSA and FBI note: “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.”