Last month, an eight-pound piece of concrete fell from the ceiling of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, damaging a light fixture and an FBI employee’s desk that he was lucky to not be occupying at the time.
“If he had been sitting there, he would have been seriously injured if not killed,” General Services Administration Administrator Emily Murphy told a congressional subcommittee Wednesday, emphasizing the urgency of moving forward with a plan to replace the 51-year-old Pennsylvania Avenue building that has served as the FBI’s headquarters since it opened.
House Appropriations Committee GSA Administrator Emily Murphy at a March 13 House subcommittee hearing Despite the urgency, the project continues to sit in limbo more than a decade after its inception. A majority of the 100-minute-long GSA Oversight Hearing was spent discussing the FBI headquarters project, largely focusing on the reversal of a plan to build a new suburban campus and instead demolish and rebuild the headquarters on the Hoover Building site, decisions made more than one year ago.
Democrats on the panel, the House Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, raised questions over President Donald Trump’s involvement in the reversal and potential conflicts of interest related to his company’s hotel one block away. The questions centered around an August report from the GSA’s Inspector General, revealing a January 2018 meeting Murphy held with Trump and concluding she may have misled Congress about his involvement in previous testimony.
Click here to read the rest of the story written by Jon Banister over at Bisnow