Kash Patel Says FBI Is Shutting Down D.C. HQ

FBI Director Kash Patel said on Friday that the bureau’s J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., which has been the agency’s headquarters for 50 years, would shut down as he seeks to move agents out of the nation’s capital.

Patel made the surprise announcement during a preview clip of Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, which was released on Friday morning, alongside Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino.

“I didn’t know I was going to do this, but I’m going to announce it on your show anyway: this FBI is leaving the Hoover Building,” Patel said. “Because this building is unsafe for our workforce. 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.”

Bongino laughed as Patel made the announcement, telling him, “You just gave up a big nugget there.”

BREAKING: Director Kash Patel announces the FBI will be leaving the J. Edgar Hoover building pic.twitter.com/VfJ1LnrJK6

— ALX ???????? (@alx) May 16, 2025

A year before he became FBI director, Patel said that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover building on Day 1 and [reopen it the] next day as a museum of the deep state.” He added that he would “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” The FBI director has been pushing major changes to the bureau, including increased “accountability” and a return to more traditional law enforcement roles.

For more than two decades, the FBI has been considering moving out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which was completed in 1975. A 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the building needed serious repairs and was “inefficient” for the FBI’s needs. Former President Joe Biden included language in his 2023 fiscal year budget to get the ball rolling on a brand new 2.1 million-square-foot headquarters for the bureau in Maryland that would house around 7,500 employees. The project would cost $2.5 billion.

President Donald Trump said in March, however, that he is putting a stop to those plans, and instead, wants to “build another big FBI building right where it is, which would have been the right place because the FBI and the DOJ [Department of Justice] have to be near each other.”

“They were going to build an FBI headquarters three hours away in Maryland, a liberal state,” Trump said, adding, “But we’re going to stop it, not going to let that happen.”

Patel also said he wants to reduce the number of FBI employees in the D.C. area.

“Look, the FBI has 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not,” Patel told Fox News. “In the national capital region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C., there were 11,000 FBI employees. That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here, so we’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.”