The FBI chief also said that some 1,500 employees will be relocated elsewhere.
FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday morning confirmed that the FBI is leaving its Washington headquarters, known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building, due to safety reasons, and that about 1,500 FBI employees will be relocated to locations around the United States.
Patel made the announcement during an interview with Fox News alongside FBI Deputy 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.”
The FBI also said he wants to lower the number of FBI employees in Washington and move them to work in other jurisdictions.
“Look, the FBI has 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not,” Patel told Fox News on Friday. “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.”
Patel said that every state will be getting more FBI agents because it will “inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say, ‘We want to work at the FBI because we want to fight violent crime and we want to be sent out into the country to do it.’”
“In the next three, six, [and] nine months, we’re going to be doing that hard,” he said.
Patel did not provide more details regarding the safety concerns around the Hoover building.
A report released in 2011 by the Government Accountability Office said the FBI’s Hoover building was in need of major repairs and that its “original design is inefficient,” which means it is “difficult to reconfigure space to promote staff collaboration.”
