The current FBI headquarters building in downtown Washington, D.C., on Nov. 23, 2023. The goverment has been lookkng for new home for the agency for years. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
A federal inspector general’s report found several faults with the process the General Services Administration took to select Maryland over Virginia as the site for a new FBI headquarters.
But the report released Monday states the GSA’s own inspector general took no position on the final selection.
Still, U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said the findings outlined in the 54-page document confirm complaints by Virginia officials that the selection process, which was switched to Greenbelt, Maryland, from Springfield, Virginia, late in the years-long review, was “fundamentally tainted.”
“As GSA cooked the books, important cost criteria were improperly weighted without sufficient rationale,” Connolly said in a statement Monday. “As part of a rushed process that overruled the unanimous opinion of a panel of career civil servants, GSA provided inaccurate information to guide the site selection process.
“And we may never know the full extent of missteps in this process, because communication records were not properly preserved,” he said of the report, which said the GSA failed to preserve text messages between officials that had been working on the site selection.
But Maryland officials welcomed the report as further proof that Greenbelt is the best site for the FBI, whose headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington have been crumbling and in need of replacement for years.
“The report … confirms what Team Maryland has always said: There was no conflict of interest in the selection of Greenbelt, Maryland, as the site for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new consolidated headquarters,” said a joint statement Monday night from a group of state and federal officials: Gov. Wes Moore, Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen and Reps. Steny Hoyer and Glenn Ivey, all Democrats.
“The Greenbelt site continues to offer the lowest cost to the American taxpayer, the greatest transit accessibility, and the most certain construction schedule. Nothing in this report disputes the GSA’s selection of Greenbelt as the future home of the FBI,” the joint statement said. “We look forward to welcoming the FBI to Maryland and moving this project forward.”
The Inspector General’s report questioned how the GSA decided to change the relative weight of factors that went into the final site decision.
The original criteria called for “FBI mission” — which included proximity to other FBI facilities — to account for 35% of the decision and cost to account for just 10%. But after Congress in late 2022 required that GSA meet with Maryland and Virginia officials and hear their concerns, including concerns about sustainability and equity of the two sites, the weights were changed.
Equity became a key component for leaders in both states based on an executive order signed in 2021 by former President Joe Biden that called for advancing equity for all races and for underserved and marginalized populations in federal agencies’ programs and policies to help those communities.
After meeting with the states’ officials in March 2023, the FBI mission’s weight was lowered from 35% to 25%. Other criteria included:
- Transportation access decreased from 25% to 20%;
- Site development and flexibility remained at 15% ;
- Sustainability and equity increased from 15% to 20%; and
- Cost increased from 10% to 20%.
The inspector general disputed the agency’s rationale for increasing the weight for the cost criterion, which included off-site improvements in both states that ranged between $300 million and $550 million. The report said the states had committed to bearing most of the off-site costs themselves and that “GSA did not provide the OIG documentation to support this range of costs with its response.”
But GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said in a Jan. 15 letter to Acting Inspector General Robert C. Erickson Jr. that increasing the percentage of cost criteria was important for taxpayers.
“If the Cost criterion was weighted at only 10 percent, it suggests that hundreds of millions of dollars in potential taxpayer costs would not be important, whether or not the jurisdictions covered them,” Carnahan wrote.
The report also questioned the weight given to equity, noting that GSA was not able to provide data down to the site level, only the county level, in essence weighing Fairfax County, Virginia, as a whole against Prince George’s County, Maryland, as a whole. A third Prince George’s County site, in Landover, finished third in the GSA analysis.
The report largely dismissed conflict-of-interest concerns over Nina Albert, a former employee of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) who had the final say on the site selection and switched it from Springfield to Greenbelt. The Greenbelt site is owned by the state and by WMATA, where Albert had worked as vice president of real estate and parking.
But the report said that Albert had been cleared by the GSA ethics office to work in the FBI project and that after July 2022 — when she was a year removed from her WMATA employment — the conflict rules no longer applied. The panel’s final recommendation was made in July 2023, about two years after Albert left the transit agency.
The report provides three recommendations for GSA: establish policies on developing, changing and approving site selection plans; establish policies on processes to ensure data used in site selections is relevant, accurate and complete; and require personnel involved in the FBI headquarters and future projects to review and preserve records via text message or chats.
The agency agreed with the text message recommendation, but noted in its response that a text message sent to an employee’s personal cell phone in September 2022 because that person “was on parental leave.”
A statement Monday night from Virginia Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine said the senators “are still carefully reviewing the GSA OIG’s report and considering next steps.”
But one Maryland state delegate said the agency’s decision in November 2023 to relocate to Prince George’s County remains the right one.
“What I would take from it [the report] is that they have questions about the process, but no questions about the end result,” said Del. Nicole Williams (D-Prince George’s), whose district includes Greenbelt. “We are still going to fight tooth and nail in making sure the headquarters will come to Prince George’s County.”
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.