Maryland and Virginia have a fraught history. In 1655, the two colonies almost went to war over how the boundary of Maryland was drawn. In 1790, there was more tension over the donation of land by both states for the new District of Columbia.
Maryland crab cakes vs. Virginia ham. Ravens vs. Commanders. Orioles vs. Nationals. There's a historic rivalry between the two states dating back centuries.
Now a new cause of friction has emerged: where to place the new, multibillion-dollar FBI headquarters. Last week, the General Services Administration chose Greenbelt, Maryland as the setting for the bureau's new digs.
But the FBI has raised some issues with how Greenbelt was selected. They allege that there was a conflict of interest In the site selection that the GSA failed to address.
“GSA looks forward to building the FBI a state-of-the-art headquarters campus in Greenbelt to advance their critical mission for years to come,” said GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan.
The "old" FBI building, dubbed the "J. Edgar Hoover Building," was built in 1975 and is apparently so decrepit that the bureau needs a new one.
On the other hand, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, formerly known as the Old Executive Office Building, is still going strong and it was finished in 1888.
I guess they just don't build government buildings like they used to.
The headquarters complex would be built on an empty 61-acre plot outside the Greenbelt Metro station — the marquee tenant in a proposed mixed-use development site that would include apartments, a hotel and retail and could bring billions of dollars of new tax revenue to the county.
Maryland leaders had pitched Greenbelt in Prince George’s, a majority-Black county just outside the nation’s capital, as a Metro-accessible site that would deliver on President Biden’s promise to invest in historically underfunded communities. Local officials in Virginia and D.C. had also lobbied hard for the project, viewed as a crown jewel for its associated jobs, prestige and economic development.
FBI director Christopher Wray is angry about the choice of Greenbelt. He claimed the three-person selection committee, made up of two GSA officials and one FBI official, actually unanimously chose Virginia. Instead, the Greenbelt site was chosen by a political appointee of the GSA.
And there's not a little hint of corruption in the selection.
It was also revealed on Thursday that Wray had sent a letter to GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan on Oct. 12 raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest by the senior political appointee at GSA who diverged from the panel’s recommendation. The FBI was concerned that “the Greenbelt parcel of land is owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which was the senior official’s immediate prior employer,” according to the internal FBI message.
While the senior official was not named in Wray’s message to employees, GSA documents published on Thursday indicate that the official in question was Nina Albert, the GSA’s then-commissioner of the Public Buildings Service, who had worked for WMATA from 2016 to 2021.
"Corruption" and "historically underfunded communities" sounds like the Biden administration to me. But has anyone bothered to ask the billion-dollar question?
Does the FBI really need a building big enough to create a workplace for thousands of more agents?
Stephen Kruiser points out the obvious: "this is the same FBI that has been focusing most of its energy on harassing conservative voters, pretending that we're all a bunch of raging domestic terrorists."
I wouldn't worry too much. By the time all the "historically underfunded communities" in Greenbelt are finished trying to extort as much money from the government as possible, it might not be until mid-century before the building is finished.
