The F.B.I. said on Monday that it would leave its crumbling headquarters and move into a nearby building vacated by the U.S. Agency for International Development, keeping the bureau in downtown Washington.
The decision to decamp to the Ronald Reagan Building potentially ends years of jockeying by legislators to relocate the country’s premier law enforcement agency — and possibly thousands of federal employees — to a suburban location in either Maryland or Virginia.
The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, hailed the cost savings of moving his agency’s headquarters down the street after the White House proposed cutting the bureau’s budget by about half a billion dollars, putting it on a spending level last seen in 2011. The announcement was short on details, including when the move would begin and the overall cost.
“We are ushering F.B.I. headquarters into a new era and providing our agents of justice a safer place to work,” Mr. Patel said in a statement. “Moving to the Ronald Reagan Building is the most cost-effective and resource-efficient way to carry out our mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.”
Michael Peters, the public buildings service commissioner at the General Services Administration, which oversees federal real estate, said the repurposing of the U.S.A.I.D. headquarters would save billions of dollars on new construction and more than $300 million in deferred maintenance costs at the old F.B.I. building.
As part of President Trump’s efforts to overhaul the federal government, the global aid agency was gutted and its headquarters emptied earlier this year in a tumultuous series of events that dismantled an institution established more than a half century ago as a linchpin of U.S. foreign policy.
The Ronald Reagan Building was dedicated in May 1998, making it almost three decades old but apparently suitable for F.B.I. headquarters and its many needs.
The brutish structure known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building was an imposing symbol of the F.B.I.’s vast federal powers when it opened in 1974. But over time, the building started to deteriorate, and a 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office detailed some of the problems.
Today the building is lined with netting to shield passers-by from falling concrete.
In a separate email to F.B.I. employees, Mr. Patel did not provide a timeline of the move or other key details but said he was working closely with Congress and the General Services Administration “to make this happen quickly.”
“We need to ensure our security and technology requirements are in place before H.Q. employees can begin making the move, in phases,” he added.
It was not immediately clear how many F.B.I. employees based in the area would work at the Reagan Building complex, but a current U.S. official with knowledge of U.S.A.I.D.’s operations said 2,500 to 3,000 of its staff members had worked there. Mr. Patel has also vowed to thin out the number of F.B.I. employees assigned to headquarters and the Capitol region. The Reagan complex also serves as the home of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Keeping F.B.I. headquarters in the District of Columbia appears to align with President Trump’s vision. Last year, he wrote on social media that the agency should remain in Washington and would be the “centerpiece of my plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city.”
Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security for The Times. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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