MD, PG County sue Trump administration over FBI HQ relocation

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Attorney General Anthony Brown filed a lawsuit Thursday against President Donald Trump’s administration for his attempt to move the FBI headquarters from Greenbelt to Washington, D.C.

“We’re not going to give something up that is this important without a fight,” Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy, a Democrat, said at a news conference in Largo. “Especially when we won this fair and square.”

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the state of Maryland and Prince George’s County, alleges that Trump’s decision to abandon the Greenbelt location for D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Building is illegal because it unlawfully diverts over $1.1 billion in funds allocated by Congress, which considered two suburban sites in Maryland and one in Virginia for the project.

No location in D.C. was considered by Congress.

“Congress had been clear: [the General Services Administration] was to choose between three locations, A, B or C, and the Trump administration picked D,” Brown, a Democrat, said. “That’s as close to failure you can get.”

Brown added that the administration additionally flouted federal law by not consulting with the state and local government on the abandonment of the project.

Congressman Steny Hoyer, a Democrat, said he has been working on relocating the headquarters since 2009, when the then-FBI director told him the current building had unsafe working conditions and made the agency vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Trump cancelled the project in 2017. It was revived by Congress in 2022.

In 2023, the General Services Administration approved the relocation of the FBI headquarters to Greenbelt in Prince George’s County. That decision was reversed by the Trump administration in July, announcing that it would be moved to the Ronald Reagan Building in D.C. — just five blocks from the location of the current headquarters.

The state of Maryland and Prince George’s County have earmarked $250 million and $100 million, respectively, to infrastructure projects for the erection of the headquarters in Greenbelt, based on the promise that the project would stimulate the local economy and bring high-paying jobs. Braveboy said Thursday that the project is projected to positively impact the county’s gross domestic product, create 7,500 jobs and will be the largest single economic development project in county history.

Late last month, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the allocation of more than $1 billion to relocate the FBI headquarters to the D.C. building, which previously housed the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said that Trump’s plan to keep the headquarters in D.C. lacks “common sense” and will put public servants’ lives in jeopardy because the Ronald Reagan building is “too old, too small and too exposed.”

State Senate President Bill Ferguson, D-Baltimore City, took that to heart, recalling a sitdown he had with his parents on April 19, 1995. His childhood friend’s father was lost among the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it was bombed by Timothy McVeigh.

“The reason Greenbelt was selected is because the men and women who work at the FBI deserve a site that will protect them from the evils that are out there,” said Ferguson. “This is not a joke.”