The Federal Bureau of Instigation Investigation has been agitating for a new headquarters – had you heard? The concrete behemoth the FBI has been operating out of since the Ford administration is supposedly “crumbling.” Lord knows it’s much too small to contain all the agents and skullduggery machinery it takes to handle the mission creep they’ve experienced – monitoring the lives and thoughts of one’s own citizens, whilst simultaneously following the Biden crime family and sundry Democratic luminaries around with a federal pooper scooper in perpetual clean-up mode.

‘We need new digs, yo!”

…The FBI now works out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, where officials have quick access to prosecutors in the Justice Department’s headquarters across Pennsylvania Avenue. But the bureau has complained that the current HQ, named for the agency’s first and longest-serving director, is crumbling and no longer meets the needs of an organization that has grown in the nearly 50 years since President Gerald Ford dedicated the building. The FBI’s separate Washington field office would be unaffected by any move.

The FBI wants a lot of things. The problem is it has also been doing a lot of things that have caught the attention and raised the ire of the American people, which helped install a slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

Why does the FBI deserve a new, palatial HQ?

Does persecuting parents at school board meetings warrant that reward?

Does arresting abortion protesters warrant that reward?

Does targeting trad Catholics warrant that reward?

All 3?https://t.co/jRXN5Mp4IR

— Jeff Clark (@JeffClarkUS) July 17, 2023

The GOP members in the House have noticed what the FBI has been doing for quite some time now. They’ve even been taking notes. They are displeased, to say the least, not just with FBI actions, but with attitudes when asked to account for such actions. That leaves Republican representatives in a mood to make things uncomfortable. If we’re really lucky, they will actually say “No” to something…

The FBI wants millions of dollars for a new headquarters.

It also wants FISA section 702 reauthorized without changes.

NO.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 12, 2023

…and follow through. What a delightful concept that would be.

Being entrenched Swamp Rats, FBI bureaucrats are very much used to dictating how and where taxpayer funds allocated to them are spent, and this case was going to be no different. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has been hunting for a location for a new FBI campus and, per G-men wishes to remain close to the action/seat of power, they’ve been concentrating locally.

…The General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s real estate, has been weighing sites in Virginia and Maryland for the location of a new FBI headquarters campus. About 5,500 workers are assigned to the Hoover building.

“Local” is a given, especially as federal workers tend to be fragile creatures. The thought of moving or even vaguely inconveniencing themselves reportedly sends them into a frenzy. Everyone knows we can’t have that, as these people are IRREPLACEABLE!!!

…More recently, the Trump administration relocated the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colo., saying that officials should be closer to the public lands they oversee. The Trump administration also moved two Agriculture Department research agencies to the Kansas City area.

Many federal workers quit their jobs rather than relocate. “What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time,” then-White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said at a state GOP event in South Carolina at the time, the news outlet Government Executive reported.

The Biden administration later reversed course on the Bureau of Land Management relocation after his Interior secretary said that it had led to a “significant loss of institutional memory and talent.”

Perish the thought. I hope no doors hit them in the asterisk on the way out.

Ohio congressman Jim Jordan had been taking notes, too, and on one of them was scribbled where the FBI was spending $3B – that’s BILLION – constructing a sprawling campus in, of all places, Redstone Arsenal outside of Huntsville, AL. The plans are so enormous, and the folks who are going to work there are so NOT field agents, that the new complex has already earned itself a nickname.

Funding for ongoing construction at the FBI campus on Redstone Arsenal has now exceeded $3 billion.

…The FBI is building what’s unofficially been described as a second headquarters at Redstone Arsenal to the primary headquarters in Washington, according to Johnnie Sharp, assistant director IT infrastructure division and the senior officer at FBI Redstone.

“It’s certainly not official,” Sharp said in an interview with AL.com in November. “But definitely you could call it an unofficial second headquarters because all the footprint here on the north and south campus (at Redstone) are headquarters entities. Not field office operations. Field office operations are conducted by the Birmingham field office and the Huntsville resident agency. Everything here on the north campus and on the south campus is a headquarters-related entity.

“It’s undeniably an unofficial second headquarters because of those 19 headquarters divisions that are represented right here on this campus.”

EVERYTHING HERE IS A HEADQUARTERS RELATED ENTITY

The benefits of moving the FBI headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama?

-20/30 FBI divisions already have a presence there.

-The FBI already considers it a secondary HQ.

-There’s already a runway for Chris Wray’s private jet. pic.twitter.com/haV3fPKbyM

— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) July 11, 2023

Rep Jordan scratched his cleft chinny chin chin and said, well, HOLD ON THERE, PARDNERS.

If we’ve already got a significant HQ cadre in the works, why are you looking elsewhere to start from scratch? Why aren’t you even considering building on what you already got going?

That darn Jordan went and got every last bureaucrats’ pant creases crumpled by sending a funding rider over to the appropriations committee chair lady, suggesting that the FBI take a good hard look at the Sweet Home AL they already have when pricing a new crib and document exactly what their plans are for a headquarters, etc.

Then he cut off the money anyway.

…That rider, as outlined in a letter Jordan sent to Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger, R-Texas, seemed less rigid than a Huntsville-or-else scenario originally reported by the Wall Street Journal. The 11-page letter was obtained by the Washington Examiner and posted on its website Tuesday.

Regarding Huntsville as the new home for FBI headquarters, the rider said only that the House Judiciary Committee – which Jordan chairs – recommends the FBI submit an “operational plan” within 90 days to move the bureau out of Washington. “The operational plan should also consider the existing resources and infrastructure available at the FBI’s Redstone Arsenal campus in Huntsville, AL,” the rider said in the only reference to Redstone Arsenal.

The rider prohibits any money in the 2024 appropriations bill to be directed toward construction of a new FBI headquarters. The FBI has long been searching for a new site for its HQ because of the deteriorating condition of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington.

Gracious, did the howling begin and it didn’t hardly take no time ‘t’all.

The AP this morning is all hot under the collar, sure that it’s Trump MAGA MAGA MAGA and that alone causing the GOP not to roll over complacently. Selective memories are so convenient.

When Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested recently he might stop the FBI from relocating its downtown headquarters to a new facility planned for the Washington suburbs, it was more than idle thinking about an office renovation.

The nod from the Republican speaker is elevating a once-fringe proposal to upend the FBI in the aftermath of the federal indictment of Donald Trump over classified documents and the Justice Department’s prosecution of his allies, including some of the nearly 1,000 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Moving from far-right corners into the mainstream, the emerging effort to overhaul the nation’s premier law enforcement agency is rooted in increasingly forceful conservative complaints about an overly biased FBI that they claim is being weaponized against them.

ZOMG – POOR FBI JUST TRIES TO DO GOOD – LEAVEZ THEMS ALONES

And there’s McCarthy, just humming along…

…“Looking at the actions of the FBI, I think the whole leadership needs to change,” McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol last month.

Fresh from a visit with law enforcement in California, McCarthy said he envisions decentralizing the FBI by spreading operations into the states.

…“I’d like to see the structure of a much smaller FBI administration building, and more FBI agents out across the country, helping to keep the country safe,” he said. “To me that’s better.”

*snort*

I swear, this is worth the price of admission. From the meltdowns about how “symbolic” it is to have those fascists in a massive, looming, impenetrable citadel dominating the D.C. burb countryside to tiny brained Sen Tim Kaine’s smug-mugging an FBI version of “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets“…

“…Ain’t gonna happen,” he [Kaine] said. “The issue is what serves the needs of the agency. The FBI wants to stay in the D.C. metro area, so that’s where it’s going to be.”

…to the cries of “unAmerican” at withholding funds from the sacrosanct bureau, it is so worth pushing these people into distraction and out into the heart of the country as soon as humanly possible.

And fumigating the empty offices so the contagion doesn’t escape or reinfect.