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One of the least-beloved, most imposing federal complexes in the District—the Federal Bureau of Investigations headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on a prime stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue NW—may not be with us for much longer.
The General Services Administration released a plan today to move the FBI to a new campus somewhere else in the D.C. region, which would free up the Hoover building for redevelopment.
According to The Washington Post‘s Jonathan O’Connell, GSA Acting Administrator Dan Tangherlini is proposing to swap the FBI’s current site for a consolidated campus in response to a directive from President Barack Obama to cut real estate costs. The GSA’s plan includes a call for private developer partners for the Hoover building and the 22-acre area south of the National Mall that it terms “Federal Triangle South.”
The GSA’s move today follows a Friday report from the Washington Business Journal that the agency was looking to move the FBI to a new 2.1 million-square-foot headquarters in D.C., suburban Maryland, or Northern Virginia.
According to that report, the GSA may need to form a public-private partnership to keep development costs down. A private developer might build the new campus and lease it to the federal government.
“At a time when doing more with less is an absolute imperative, GSA is aggressively working to find new and innovative ways to save money and increase efficiency,” Tangherlini said in a statement. “An exchange of the FBI headquarters not only saves money, but it also promotes efficiency by consolidating staff into a single state-of-the-art facility, shrinking the federal real estate footprint and eliminating multiple leases.”