The FBI Washington Headquarters Won’t Be Missed By Victor Davis Hanson

[mystery-ak]

The FBI Washington Headquarters Won’t Be Missed › American Greatness
Victor Davis Hanson


Current FBI Director Kash Patel is closing down the agency’s Washington, DC, mothership office and moving at least 1,500 employees out of the DC area to regional offices.

The decision was not just Patel’s.

During the Biden Administration, it was determined that the 50-year-old Hoover building headquarters was structurally decrepit. More germanely, no prior FBI director had ever explained why nearly a third of the FBI workforce was centered in offices in Washington, far from where most of the serious crime in America occurs.

The news is welcome for reasons well beyond the safety of agents in an apparently unsafe headquarters.

It is no exaggeration to state that most of the FBI scandals of the last decade were born in the Hoover building headquarters, suggesting that the agency had long become top-heavy, politically weaponized, and deeply embedded in and compromised by the Washington apparat.

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https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/19/the-fbi-washington-headquarters-wont-be-missed/

[The_Reader_David]

This is a good restructuring of the FBI (though being far from Washington is not a very strong guard against politicization, remember that it was the Cincinnati office of the IRS that politicized decisions on non-profit status), but are they actually going to tear down the building?  It's a brutalist blot on the generally attractive architecture of government buildings in DC.  Since the government is downsizing under Trump, perhaps it can be replaced with a park, or if its location commends itself to continued uses by some government agency, a nice neo-classical building construction of which could provide some good construction jobs for a while.