Spanish
Washington.- The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, for its acronym in English), Kash Patel, announced this Friday that he will close its historic building in Washington and distribute its employees to other headquarters in the country.
"The FBI has 38,000 agents (in the U.S.) when we are at full strength, which is not the case. Within a 50-mile radius of Washington there were 11,000 employees. That's like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn't happen here, so we are moving 1,500 of those people out," he said in an interview on the Fox Business network.
The Donald Trump administration had previously considered that the FBI should abandon the J. Edgar Hoover building, located in the center of the capital, because, as Patel confirmed, "it is not safe for its staff".
"We want American men and women to know that if they are going to come to work at the world's leading law enforcement agency, we are going to give them a building that is in keeping with that, and this is not that place," he said in this regard without detailing the dates of his plan.
A few years ago, the possibility of moving these offices to Maryland or Virginia, states bordering the District of Columbia, was already considered, but it was ruled out for economic reasons.
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The building, which is named after the first FBI director, was inaugurated in 1975 and despite its history has never convinced the public. In fact, some surveys by specialized media place it as one of the ugliest constructions in the world.
It follows the brutalist aesthetic in which concrete surfaces and muted colors such as beige and gray predominate.
