A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from relocating FBI headquarters to Washington's Reagan Building, ruling that officials illegally abandoned a years-old, congressionally funded plan to build a new campus in Greenbelt, Maryland.
U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, in a 47-page opinion, found the administration's decision to divert more than $323 million earmarked for the Greenbelt project was "arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with law," siding with a lawsuit brought by the state of Maryland. The ruling, reported by CBS News, effectively restores Greenbelt as the bureau's designated future home.
The Greenbelt site was chosen in 2023 after a 15-year federal search process that beat out competing bids elsewhere in Maryland and Virginia. FBI Director Kash Patel reversed course last year, announcing the bureau would instead move a few blocks from its current home into the Reagan Building, a downtown federal office complex, calling it the "most cost-effective and resource-efficient way to carry out our mission."
Maryland officials argued the switch amounted to an unlawful attempt to sabotage a done deal. Attorney General Anthony Brown praised the ruling for "clearing the path back to Greenbelt," while an FBI spokesperson countered that the court had "impermissibly intervene[d] for political reasons" and said the bureau remained "mission focused."
The dispute matters beyond real-estate politics: the bureau's current home, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, has needed protective netting to catch falling concrete and has faced other structural problems for roughly two decades, and officials have debated its replacement since the George W. Bush administration. The ruling doesn't itself break ground on a new building — it blocks the administration's pivot to Reagan and leaves Greenbelt as the legally operative plan. The administration is expected to weigh an appeal, meaning the bureau's next address may still not be settled for years.
