FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau will be leaving its longtime headquarters in Washington’s J. Edgar Hoover Building and relocating 1,500 employees to offices across the country.
“This FBI is leaving the Hoover building because this building is unsafe for our workforce,” Patel told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in a preview clip from his upcoming appearance on Sunday Morning Futures. “We want the American men and women to know if you’re going to come work at the premier law enforcement agency in the world, we’re going to give you a building that’s commensurate with that—and that’s not this place.”
Patel did not detail the specific safety concerns with the aging brutalist structure on Pennsylvania Avenue, nor did he provide a timeline for the relocation or reveal the site of a future headquarters.
He emphasized that the move is part of a broader decentralization effort. “The FBI is 38,000 strong when fully staffed. In the D.C. area alone, there are about 11,000 employees—that’s a third of the workforce, and a third of the crime doesn’t happen here,” Patel said.
According to Patel, every state will receive additional personnel as part of the plan. “We’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out,” he said. “When we do things like that, we inspire Americans to become intel analysts and agents because they want to fight violent crime—and they want to be sent out into the country to do it.”
He added that the relocations will begin within “the next three, six, nine months.”
