The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved an amendment to the annual Justice Department funding bill aimed at blocking the Trump administration from keeping the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The committee voted 15-14 to adopt language that seeks to block funding from being used to relocate the headquarters from its current J. Edgar Hoover Building site to any location other than the Greenbelt, Md., site selected by the General Services Administration in 2023.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) bucked party lines to join Democrats in backing the proposal.
“My understanding is that this has been a decision that was made just very recently,” Murkowski said ahead of the vote. “So I, for one, would like to know that this analysis has actually been going on for more than just a couple months, that there’s actually been that effort to ensure that we’re going to move forward.”
Republicans had sought to have the amendment withdrawn to allow members to receive more information from the FBI regarding the relocation plans, but Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the senior appropriator who offered the proposal, declined.
Van Hollen said the previous decision to bring the FBI headquarters to Maryland was the result of a lengthy, competitive process to replace the current crumbling structure in D.C., accusing the Trump administration of not performing a sufficient analysis before changing the plan.
“A few weeks ago, the administration just announced that it wanted to snatch the $555 million that had been set aside for down payment on that selected site and use it instead to move the FBI into the Ronald Reagan Building,” he said at the top of the markup session Thursday.
“No analysis done with respect to security requirements, no analysis done with respect to FBI mission requirements, no review of the underlying statute as to the purpose of the Ronald Reagan Building, no analysis of what they would do with current tenants in that building.”
The Hill has reached out to the FBI for comment.
The Trump administration announced last week that instead of moving the headquarters to the selected site in Maryland, it would instead move the FBI to space within the Ronald Reagan Building – office space formerly occupied in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The move infuriated members of the Maryland delegation, who said the Greenbelt site was selected after a competitive process and was the best fit for the bureau.
But that process led to accusations of a conflict of interest by many in the Virginia delegation a state that also had a location under consideration who asked to pause any relocation efforts.
The Office of Inspector General agreed to investigate the matter after then-FBI Director Christopher Wray noted one of those responsible for reviewing the decision previously worked for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which owns the Greenbelt land now designated for construction of a new headquarters.
The current Hoover Building faces a number of challenges. Many would like to see the FBI in a more state-of-the-art facility outfitted with better security features.
The building itself is also crumbling, currently encased in netting to protect passersby from falling debris.
The annual DOJ funding bill is one of a dozen annual funding bills that Senate negotiators hope to send out of committee in the weeks ahead as lawmakers stare down a late September deadline to prevent a government shutdown.
The funding bills seen so far in the Senate committee are more bipartisan in nature than the GOP-crafted legislation proposed in the House.
But as both chambers fall behind in their annual funding work, some are already expecting a stopgap measure will be needed to prevent a shutdown in October and buy Congress more time to strike an eventual bicameral funding deal for fiscal 2026.
