(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Amid the $1 trillion in new spending Republicans offered in their coronavirus stimulus package this week was an oddity: In addition to funding for unemployment insurance and small-business loans, the proposal would appropriate $1.75 billion to build a new headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. Asked why such a measure was included in a pandemic-relief bill, Republican senators suffered a collective loss of memory.
It was included because the White House insisted. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in the FBI’s accommodations. In 2017, his administration scrapped a plan to move the headquarters to a campus in Maryland or Virginia, and then proposed a new building on the existing site.
By all accounts, the bureau’s current headquarters — the J. Edgar Hoover building on Pennsylvania Avenue — isn’t the answer. A report in 2011 found that it was deteriorating, inadequate for the bureau’s staffing needs, and, for a variety of reasons, a security risk. It’s also hideous, by the way.
This last point has been much on the president’s mind. He has reportedly called the site “terrible” and “one of the ugliest buildings in the city.” It so happens that he owns a hotel across the street. Because many of its rooms overlook the Hoover building, the plan to rehouse the FBI on the same site would improve the view, help his business and prevent other developers from using the location for a competing property. One hesitates to question this president’s integrity — but could it be that Trump is insisting on this project purely for personal gain?
Any other explanation faces two challenges.
First, none of the administration’s various rationales for this intervention makes sense. At one point, the justification was to “save the government money,” yet the new plan would be far more costly than the previous one. Trump has said that the FBI wants to stay put, yet his plan would require thousands of the bureau’s staffers to move to other states and wouldn’t serve its security priorities. He has also said that the building is simply “a great address.” Opinions may vary, but this would be an unusual basis for deciding how to spend nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money.
The second problem — a familiar one in this White House — is that almost everyone involved has dithered and dissembled when asked about the project. One official at the General Services Administration may have given “misleading” testimony to Congress about Trump’s role in the proposal, according to an inspector general’s report. Others avoided questions with dubious claims of executive privilege. Courts have ruled that four federal agencies wrongly withheld records related to the project, while multiple congressional committees have alleged that the FBI is doing the same. Remember: This is supposedly a dispute about federal facilities management.
In sum, the next coronavirus relief bill might contain funding for a plan to put the FBI in a more expensive, less secure location, at the insistence of a president with a personal stake, for reasons he can’t consistently explain. No big deal, you say? That’s the bigger shame. This episode wouldn’t rank among the administration’s top 10 scandals.
Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.
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