The FBI director, Kash Patel, is no fan of the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue and all that it symbolizes. It is, in his estimation, an aging brutalist eyesore that’s “unsafe” for the thousands of FBI personnel who work there. It is the embodiment of deep state rot; best to either be turned into a museum or to be taken over by the next tenant. 

“We’ve got to get smart and stop wasting money. We’ve got to stop thinking up fantasies in Maryland and building $5 billion new buildings,” Mr. Patel told Maria Bartiromo during a recent appearance on her Sunday morning Fox News show. Faced with a budget cut of $500 million for 2026, Mr. Patel is looking for new ways to reallocate resources.

He has an eye on the FBI’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, “one of the crown jewels of the FBI,” he told  Ms. Bartiromo. 

“We need our outdated facilities and personnel to move to Huntsville, where the training has been set up for them, and fill those seats. We don’t need to build new buildings elsewhere,” Mr. Patel said.

It’s not the first time Mr. Patel has praised the FBI’s sprawling campus on Redstone Arsenal since becoming FBI director. 

Who could blame him? Huntsville, nicknamed “the Rocket City,” is the largest city in Alabama (though that’s not saying much), and the longtime home of a major NASA facility. SpaceX, Raytheon, Blue Origin, and Toyota also have major presences in Huntsville, where the cost of living is 30 percent lower than in Washington, D.C., according to NerdWallet’s cost of living calculator.

“This area is very unique. It has very well-educated people as a whole, and I would say it is a very nice place to live,” a former FBI Huntsville assistant section chief, Jim Shorter, told the Sun. “The nice thing about this area is you are conveniently located to Nashville and Atlanta, so we can get to places relatively easily, and especially now, the airports are getting even more direct flights.”

But landlocked Huntsville, in deep red Alabama, is well outside the so-called Acela corridor of culturally elite, liberal cities such as Washington, New York, and Boston, and lacks the cultural amenities, elite universities, and Michelin starred restaurants to which D.C.-area residents may be accustomed. The nearest major city, Atlanta, is a three-hour drive away.

Critics of the FBI’s centralized, Washington-centric culture that developed during the long directorships of Robert Mueller and James Comey — both despised by President Trump — have argued that the bureau must be uprooted forcefully. Mr. Patel himself proposed, as a private citizen, that the Hoover building be converted into a “museum of the deep state.” 

“In the National Capital Region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C., there were 11,000 FBI employees. That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here,” Mr. Patel told Ms. Bartiromo, calling the building “unsafe for our workforce.”

“The problem with Hoover is just it’s basically out-lived,” Mr. Shorter told the Sun. “There are parts that have been crumbling for years.”

Where the J. Edgar Hoover Building is dilapidated, the Redstone Arsenal is new and state-of-the-art.

“For too long, the Bureau has been a D.C.-centric institution when in reality, federal resources should be responsive to the public and the needs in their communities. This is exactly why decentralizing the FBI and moving agents into the field where they can more effectively help keep America safe is a priority for Director Patel,” a FBI spokesman, Ben Williamson, tells the Sun.

In April, Mr. Patel joined Senators Tuberville and Britt, both Republicans of Alabama, on an in-person tour of the Redstone Arsenal. His visit left him instantly smitten with the space.

“The capabilities down the street — I’ve been in government a long time — they don’t exist anywhere else, and the space doesn’t exist anywhere else,” he told reporters in April. 

First opened as a chemical munitions manufacturing and storage plant during World War II, the Redstone Arsenal later became the primary site for Project Paperclip, a collaboration between the Americans and “the Huntsville Germans,” a group of former Nazi scientists and engineers that included Wernher von Braun. It would be von Braun who would help develop America’s first generation of ballistic missiles and become the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal, in 1960.

In 1971, the FBI, in partnership with the United States Army, opened the Hazardous Devices School at Redstone, the first facility of its kind that trained and certified bomb technicians in the country. Since then, the FBI has turned Redstone Arsenal into its “unofficial second headquarters.” The FBI has expanded its footprint to two campuses that house the FBI’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center and the Ballistic Research Facility, among other divisions.

Currently, the FBI has 20 of its 30 headquarters divisions on site. Construction has been completed on the FBI’s Innovation Center, its “marquee” 250,000-square-foot development on its North Campus that aims to be “the epicenter of the FBI’s technology, infrastructure, and tool development, centralizing our tech talent and tools,” an FBI assistant director, Johnnie Sharp, said in December 2024.

Development on the South Campus, which includes a multi-purpose Range Complex, to be used for “small- and large-scale training events,” and the Practical Problem Venues, a “realistic” and “tech-forward” training site for the FBI, along with three additional buildings, is currently on hold.

During a budget hearing earlier this month, Mr. Patel said the agency would need an additional $160 million to complete the development at the South Campus sometime in the next three years, after which an additional 1,300 to 1,400 FBI employees will be moved to Huntsville.

“We are not removing them out of Washington, D.C., to remove them. We need a place that allows their skills to be met, and it’s not in Washington, D.C., and tragically, it’s not Quantico either. I wish it worked,” Mr. Patel said during the hearing.

But for all of Mr. Patel’s dislike of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI’s headquarters, no matter what the size, may realistically be hard to uproot from D.C.

“With the advancements in communications and case management, the need for a centralized facility in D.C. has lessened. But there will always be a need for the main functions and upper-level management of the FBI to be in D.C.,” a retired FBI special agent and associate professor at the Texas A&M Bush School of Government, Michael Howell, told the Sun. Close coordination with the Department of Justice and the White House would be difficult if FBI senior leadership were 700 miles away.

Mr. Patel has already ordered 500 full-time FBI personnel to be transferred to Huntsville from D.C. by year’s end. 

As the lone federal agency that has the manpower and capabilities to handle complex foreign counterintelligence, violent crimes, and cybercrime investigations, the FBI could afford to be further decentralized. But moving the whole operation to Huntsville from Washington, for now, may be too ambitious and impractical for the FBI to execute.

“Oversight of those functions is probably better centralized in D.C.,” Mr. Howell said.