BUDGET/FBI: “The federal government has canceled the search for a new F.B.I. headquarters, ensuring that the nation’s top law enforcement agency will be housed in a crumbling, cramped building in downtown Washington for years to come, according to a senior government official.
For more than a decade, the government had been searching for a new location in the Washington suburbs to replace the 43-year-old J. Edgar Hoover Building, a Brutalist edifice that sits across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Trump International Hotel.
The Hoover Building has room for only a little more than half of the 11,000 F.B.I. employees who work at its headquarters. The rest are scattered among more than a dozen offices in and around Washington.
A handful of bidders, for sites including Greenbelt and Landover in Maryland and Springfield, Va., were competing for the right to build a new 2.1-million-square-foot headquarters.
But the momentum for the project, which had been championed by the Obama administration, stalled over the past year as interest from Congress waned in the face of steep costs.”
-Michael S. Schmidt, “Washington Cancels Plan to Build New F.B.I. Headquarters,” The New York Times online, July 10, 2017