Judge Rules The Government Cannot Simply Move The FBI To A Building It Likes Better

GREENBELT, Md.—A federal judge has reminded the administration that the government’s money arrives with instructions, and that the instructions are not merely a suggestion printed on the check.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang blocked the administration from canceling a long-approved plan to build a new FBI headquarters here in Greenbelt and moving the bureau instead into the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, a federal complex a few blocks from the FBI’s current home. In a forty-seven-page opinion, the judge found the administration had diverted money Congress specifically set aside for the Maryland campus, and called the maneuver arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with law.

The plan had a certain efficiency to it. The old headquarters is old. The Reagan Building is nearby, already owned, and available. The only complication was that Congress had appropriated the funds for a different building in a different state, a detail the administration treated as a rounding error and the judge treated as the entire case.

Officials had presented the relocation as a matter of getting the bureau out of a crumbling structure, which is a real problem, and into a building the administration preferred, which is not the same problem. The court declined to accept the crumbling as authorization for the moving, noting that a failing roof does not grant the executive branch power to redirect an appropriation wherever it finds convenient.

The ruling leaves the FBI where it has been, in the building everyone agrees is failing, pending a lawful decision about the building that will replace it. The administration is expected to appeal. At press time the bureau’s headquarters remained both structurally unsound and, the court was pleased to report, exactly where Congress paid for it to be.