GOP vs. FBI: A Republican campaign to stop a new FBI headquarters is revving up after Trump probes

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “This is a pretty dramatic reversal of what the politics would have been 50 years ago,” said Beverly Gage, a historian at Yale who won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of the legendary FBI director, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The shifting attitudes among Republican members of Congress toward the FBI underscore the way Trump’s personal grievances have become legislative policy. Wray told the lawmakers that dismantling or defunding the FBI would be disastrous for the bureau’s 38,000 employees and “hurt our great state local law enforcement partners that depend on us each day to work with them on a whole slew of challenging threats.” Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called the hearing “bizarre.” “I didn’t think I would ever see Republicans attacking a Republican appointed by Donald Trump to lead the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, essentially saying they want to defund the FBI,” she said. “And that is really what this is about.” Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, submitted a proposal before the hearing that calls for “eliminating taxpayer funding for any new FBI headquarter facility.” Jordan said in a letter to the Republican chair of the House appropriations committee that he also wants a plan for moving the FBI headquarters out of Washington, noting an existing facility in Huntsville, Alabama — a recommendation Heritage has also made. “One of the goals we’ve set in this Congress as Republicans is to do the oversight so we can impact the appropriations process,” Jordan said in a brief interview at the Capitol, and “put limitations on how taxpayer money is spent to stop the weaponization of these agencies against the American people.” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, which is competing with neighboring Maryland to host the new FBI headquarters, called the Republican ideas “a solution in search of a problem.” “I think they just got a political bug against federal law enforcement agencies,” he said.