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FBI Director Kash Patel announced the law enforcement agency will be leaving its Washington, DC headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building and transferring 1,500 employees to locations around the country.

In an interview with Fox Business, Patel stated, “This FBI is leaving the Hoover building 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 11-story Brutalist-style building opened in 1975. Patel was not pressed on what aspects of the building were unsafe, although it has a well-documented history of structural problems that first became visible in 2001. Plans to relocate the FBI were floated in 2013 but were canceled four years later due to a lack of funding to construct a new headquarters.

Patel declared having a large workforce centered in Washington made little practical sense.

“Look, the FBI is 38,000 when we are fully manned, which we are not,” he continued. “In the national capital region in the 50-mile radius around Washington, DC, 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 are taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out. Every state is getting a plus-up. And I think when we do things like that, we 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.”

Patel added the timeline for this initiative will be between three and nine months.

Photo: National Park Service