A federal district judge in Maryland Monday overturned Trump administration plans to build the next FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., restoring Greenbelt as the likely next home for the agency.
The 47-page ruling and two-page order by U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang said the abrupt decision last year by the FBI and the General Services Administration (GSA) to say they would move the headquarters into the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington exceeded their authority and was “unlawful.”
Chuang’s order vacated the decision by the two agencies, which tossed out years of debate and study that led to the selection of the Greenbelt site in 2023, and ordered them to reverse their plan to reprogram $555 million of Greenbelt funding “to relocate to, renovate, build-out, and furnish” the Reagan Building as the next FBI headquarters.
The White House referred requests for comment to the FBI, which did not immediately respond to a request Monday
evening. But Maryland officials were tripping over themselves to cheer the ruling.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who was first to report the decision late Monday afternoon, said that by blocking the Trump administration attempt to move the project and divert the funds, “the Court has cleared the path back to Greenbelt.”
“This victory is about more than a building. It is about ensuring that when Congress makes a decision, the Federal Government cannot simply ignore it because they do not like the outcome,” Brown said in a prepared statement.
Gov. Wes Moore (D) said Trump “tried to take from Maryland what Maryland had already won. He failed.”
“I am grateful to all of Team Maryland – especially Congressman Steny Hoyer – who have worked tirelessly for decades to make this a reality,” he said in a statement released by his office. “Now it is time to stop the games and get to work building the world-class FBI headquarters that our public servants deserve, where it belongs: in Prince George’s County, Maryland.”
Team Maryland is a reference to the coalition of state, local and federal officials who pushed back against the Reagan Building proposal, and filed the lawsuit last November that Chuang ruled on Monday.
All sides agree that a new headquarters building is needed to replace the current facility, the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The brutalist, concrete building, which opened in 1974, long ago outlived its usefulness and has been literally falling apart for years, with pieces of concrete falling off the building at times.
The dilapidated building is too small for current agency functions, forcing the FBI to lease office space around Washington, which is not only costly but does not allow for efficient management of the sprawling FBI.
Repairing the Hoover Building has been determined to be neither technically nor economically feasible. Congress in 2011 directed the GSA to find a new site on federal land in the Washington area, within 2 miles of a Metro station and 2.5 miles of the Capital Beltway, for a new consolidated headquarters building. Proceeds from the sale of the Hoover Building were to be dedicated to the project.
The GSA quickly developed a short list of sites: Greenbelt and Landover in Maryland, and Springfield, in Northern Virginia. In 2017, Congress approved funding for the project.
But in July 2017, during Trump’s first term, the FBI and GSA hit the brakes on the project, saying Congress had not appropriated sufficient funding for the entire project. It stalled for the rest of Trump’s term.
In 2022, Congress restarted the process and in November 2023 — after serious wrangling between lawmakers in Maryland and Virginia — the director of a special GSA selection committee announced Greenbelt as its choice.
The Trump administration upended that on July 1, 2025, when the FBI and GSA jointly announced that they were abandoning Greenbelt and moving the headquarters to the Reagan Building, a few blocks away from its current location.
Maryland officials sued, claiming that the selection of Greenbelt had been authorized by Congress and could not simply be reversed by executive agencies.
Chuang agreed, saying the agencies exceeded their authority and their actions violated the law and the Administrative Protection Act. He also issued an injunction against the government taking any actions or spending any funds to facilitate the Reagan Building move.
The government argued in court that rejecting the Reagan Building would “likely result in the FBI Headquarters remaining in the Hoover Building indefinitely,” since it would not order construction to start on Greenbelt. But Chuang disagreed, saying rejecting the Reagan Building would have the effect of reinstating Greenbelt as the selected site for the project.
Team Maryland — eight of the nine members of the state’s congressional delegation — vowed to keep fighting to make the new headquarters in Greenbelt a reality.
“We will not stop fighting to fulfill our promise to the men and women of the Bureau to deliver a new, secure headquarters in Maryland so they can do their work without compromising their safety or our national security,” they said in a joint statement Monday night.
Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy welcomed the decision, saying the FBI project would be “the single largest economic development project in the history of Prince George’s County.”
“It is estimated to create over 7,500 jobs and add approximately $4 billion to the GDP of the County and State,” she said in a statement released by her office. “If you look at the history of economic development in the Metro DC region, landing a major federal agency like the FBI has been the catalyst for significant economic development.
“Prince George’s County simply wants the opportunity to reap the economic benefits that would flow from locating the FBI HQ in Greenbelt,” Braveboy said.
Maryland Matters reporter William J. Ford contributed to this report.
This article is republished from Maryland Matters (marylandmatters.org) under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
