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FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said last month he could not accept a federal official’s decision to relocate the agency’s headquarters from downtown Washington to the Maryland suburbs, criticizing the politically fraught and drawn out site selection process as fatally flawed, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.
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The Oct. 12 letter sent from the FBI director to the top official at the General Services Administration — the agency that oversees federal real estate — called on the agency to scrap its Maryland selection and restart the entire process. Wray said a former GSA official in charge of the process until her departure last month, made questionable decisions that ignored the recommendations of a panel convened to choose the most suitable location.
The letter from Wray to Robin Carnahan, the head of GSA, was a remarkable rejection of the results of a hard-fought selection process that has taken years, pitting officials in Maryland and Virginia against each other as they vied for a massive new federal complex, which has promised to generate billions of dollars in taxpayer revenue. After receiving the letter, the GSA decided it was proceeding anyway with the Greenbelt site decision.
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On Thursday morning, Wray spoke to senior FBI leaders about the decision and sent an email to the workforce, telling them a three-person panel working on the decision had unanimously recommended a different site, one in Springfield, Va.
One of the factors favoring Springfield was its proximity to the FBI training facility and science labs in Quantico, Va. It is also closer to other FBI operations in Northern Virginia.
Despite the panel’s recommendations, the GSA ultimately concluded that the other factors under consideration gave Greenbelt the edge because it “provides the greatest transportation access to FBI employees and visitors, gives the government the most certainty on schedule, and is the lowest cost to taxpayers. It also has the greatest potential to advance sustainability and equity,” according to an agency document describing the decision process.
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FBI officials said in that process, a senior GSA official repeatedly upgraded Greenbelt’s rating and downgraded Springfield’s scores.
“The site selection panel wrote a detailed consensus report articulating the basis for its recommendation of Springfield,” Wray wrote, but that recommendation was overruled by the GSA official. The Springfield site is already owned by the federal government, but GSA officials were concerned it would be time-consuming to relocate the federal workers already there.
“Unfortunately, we have concerns about fairness and transparency in the process and GSA’s failure to adhere to its own site selection plan,” Wray wrote. “Despite our engagement with GSA over the last two months on these issues, our concerns about the process remain unresolved.”
Wray’s letter to the workforce emphasized “our concerns are not with the decision itself but with the process … For our part, we will continue to be clear about our process concerns, even as we work with GSA toward the design and construction of a facility.”
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He also said the FBI hopes to secure funding to build office space in D.C. that would house up to 1,000 employees. It’s unclear if that building would be at its current location on Pennsylvania Avenue.
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A senior GSA official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the process, denied the FBI’s allegations that the selection process was compromised. The official said it is not uncommon for the agency to override a panel’s recommendation.
The GSA picked Greenbelt as the new headquarters site over two other finalists in the competition: Landover, which is also in Prince George’s County, and Springfield, in Fairfax County, Va.
In his Oct. 12 letter to the GSA, Wray said the agency “cannot accept a site selection decision with these unresolved issues,” and asked that a new official be appointed “to re-run the site selection process.”
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Wray’s letter said the official overseeing the site selection process did not see eye to eye with the panel on key issues, and “disagreed with the panel’s unanimous rating of the Greenbelt site” to increase that site’s scores.
That official, Nina Albert, had worked previously for Metro, which owns the Greenbelt parcel, which the FBI said was a concern given how the decision-making was done. Without naming her, Wray wrote that Albert “was later granted overarching power to select the site without adhering to the recommendation of the unanimous panel and with limitless ability to decide when outside information should and should not be considered in making the site selection decision.”
The GSA official said the agency was aware that Albert previously worked at the transit agency and that officials did a thorough check with their ethics division before Albert became involved with the selection process.
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Albert left the GSA in October and was tapped to be head of economic development for the administration of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D).
Wray’s letter did not suggest “a lack of integrity” by Albert, but said “for a project of this magnitude and significance,” the official making the decision “simply should not have previous, direct affiliation with one of the parties of this procurement.”
Albert worked at Metro from 2016 to 2021. She joined the GSA in July 2021 as public buildings commissioner, a senior position in which she managed the federal real estate portfolio nationwide. According to Wray’s letter, Albert was appointed in July 2023 to serve as the site selection authority for the new FBI headquarters. In that position, she oversaw the three-member panel and gave her authority to choose the best location for the FBI, even if it went against the committee recommendation.
Albert could not immediately be reached for comment.
Metro has been working to develop the land around the Greenbelt station since at least 2000, when it signed a contract with a private developer that gave the company an option to purchase the land as part of a larger development.
-Jonathan O’Connell and Michael Brice-Saddler contributed to this report.
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