Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,
A federal court on Aug. 17 blocked a Trump administration plan to move the proposed new FBI headquarters to the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington instead of a site in nearby Greenbelt, Maryland, that was chosen in 2023.
Congress passed laws requiring the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the federal government’s real estate holdings, to select a site for the project from among three suburban sites outside of Washington: Greenbelt; Landover, Maryland; or Springfield, Virginia. In 2023, GSA chose Greenbelt.
However, in July 2025, the Trump administration jettisoned those plans and said it would be more cost-effective to move the FBI to the Reagan Building, which houses U.S. Customs and Border Protection and, until last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled in favor of the state of Maryland and Prince George’s County, finding the federal government illegally scrapped the plan to build the facility in Greenbelt, and reprogrammed funds Congress already approved for the project to an alternate location.
Chuang said choosing the Reagan Building ran afoul of legislation Congress approved in 2022 and 2023 that directed the GSA to select one of three sites.
“Notably, the text provides no conditions under which the selection could be unilaterally rescinded or switched to a nonconforming site,” Chuang said in his written opinion.
“Had Congress sought to make the location restriction associated with the site selection provisional or qualified, it could have done so,” the judge said.
Because the Trump administration did not have authority to choose the Reagan Building, it could not lawfully reprogram $555 million in previously appropriated funds to prepare that site, he said.
The federal government’s decision to reprogram the funds was “arbitrary and capricious” because it was based on a misinterpretation of existing law “under which the FBI erroneously concluded that the FBI and the GSA had the authority to select the Reagan Building as the site for the consolidated FBI headquarters,” the judge said.
The court vacated the reprogramming and site selection decisions and issued a permanent injunction blocking the government from implementing the Reagan Building plan or reprogramming the funds.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, hailed the new court ruling.
“From the beginning, we said the decision to move the FBI headquarters to Greenbelt was final, earned, and the Trump Administration’s attempt to overturn it was illegal and wrong for our national security. Today, the court agreed,” Moore said in a statement.
“Now it is time to stop the games and get to work building the world-class FBI headquarters that our public servants deserve, where it belongs: in Prince George’s County, Maryland.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice for comment. No reply was received by publication time.
Reuters contributed to this report.
