Skip to main content

Boring but expensive: What the FBI costs taxpayers for the properties they have



It may seem like minutiae, but the costs of buildings for government use can be far more expensive than people imagine. While there most likely could be some cuts made, as the repairs and maintenance are done by a government that loves spending money, there won’t be in the current environment. These costs add up, which goes to show where tax dollars are going in ways few even look into. The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure looked into this and found little corruption, but massive spending. The sheer amount of acreage and money is mind boggling.

Total Costs

Here, via the Committee hearing transcripts, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) opens the hearing with some startling facts.

“The FBI has a massive real estate portfolio across this country, comprised of a headquarters building in downtown Washington, D.C., 56 field offices and more than 350 satellite offices, also known as “resident agencies,” under its field office umbrella. Together the network of field offices and resident agencies represents more than 12 million rentable square feet of space. The FBI also controls the campus in Quantico, Virginia, a data center in Pocatello, Idaho, and has a substantial presence at the United States Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and, several years ago, GSA completed construction of a new records management facility in Winchester, Virginia.”

“Currently, we have GSA prospectuses for FBI leases pending Committee approval that would account for nearly 800,000 square feet of space, costing $40 million annually, or nearly $800 million over the terms of the proposed leases. And, we recently received the official proposal for a new FBI headquarters building in Greenbelt, Maryland.”

“The bottom line is – the FBI’s space footprint is massive and costly. And, so it is critical that we ensure the FBI’s real estate is right-sized and that we understand how each proposal for space fits into an overall strategy.”

“But, some of the FBI’s space proposals simply don’t make sense. For example, despite the FBI decreasing the number of people working out of a new headquarters, the current headquarters proposal maintains the same 2.1 million square feet of space as was proposed in 2016. And, the price has ballooned. The cost went from under $3 billion to now well over $4.3 billion and that is on top of the FBI proposing to maintain a headquarters footprint in the District of Columbia.”

“To make matters even worse, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposes to fund most of this project through the creation of a new Federal Capital Revolving Fund (FCRF) that would need $10 billion in seed money.”

Property Use

Here, via testimony from Assistant Director Nicholas Dimos, is what all of this is used for.

“The threat environment also impacts the space and size requirements within FBI facilities. After September 11, 2001, the workload and workforce of the FBI transformed as the FBI saw significant growth in its counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cyber, and intelligence programs. Not only did this transformation increase the operational tempo of the FBI, but it increased the number of positions by almost 13,000 (from over 24,000 positions in 2001 to over 37,000 positions today). In addition to the FBI workforce, over the past two decades the FBI has increasingly relied on the partnership of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners. Since 2001, over 600 new task forces have been established, bringing over 7,000 task force officers into FBI space for case coordination and intelligence sharing.”

“FBI facilities consist of much more than office space – they are operational spaces that enable the FBI to conduct joint operations with these federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners through Joint Terrorism, Cyber, Safe Streets, and other task forces; analyze and disseminate essential intelligence to foreign and domestic partners; forensically exploit digital media and other evidence collected during the course of investigations; monitor audio, visual, and electronic surveillance; coordinate undercover operations; serve as a translation hub for foreign language needs throughout the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and for FBI cases; host meetings with private sector partners to convey sensitive threat information; and coordinate extraterritorial investigations overseas.”

“FBI facilities support these unique mission sets, to include space for custodial interviews of suspects, interviews of victims, evidence holding and processing, weapons and ammunition vaults, computer forensics laboratories, automotive bays capable of housing specialty vehicles

(e.g., SWAT vehicles), and space to house specialty equipment for the FBI’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives (CBRNE) response mission. These requirements drive some of our tenant improvement costs when working with GSA to identify locations for FBI field offices.”

There is more information, but it breaks down to this, the FBI has massive amounts of land, building space, and all of this in the billions of tax dollars. If the FBI did its job correctly, then this expense would not be such a big deal. At the same time, it would be interesting the costs that could be saved if people with experience in the private sector were to audit everything. Some suggestions can be made, but they would be dismissed, as they would not be from government experts being paid far more for doing far less.

My e-book: https://freedomvn-games.itch.io/founding-freedom-primer

See my content at: https://www.facebook.com/PaulShannonRamblings/

Help support me at: https://www.patreon.com/FreedomVN

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The government employee union with more power than the American people Part 6

To get members and dues for their political purposes, the SEIU has used illegal tactics over the years. They have been taken to court many times, yet they persist every chance they get. The reason they do this is to gain more and more power, along with grabbing as much money as they can from the members to use for political purposes. They have already stated how they are using all of this in the article I recently wrote, which means people need to know what is happening. Kaiser Permanente The SEIU and Kaiser Permanente worked together to force employees to join the union before 2006. Both were taken to court and smacked down. Here is what occurred, via a National Right to Work release.  In a victory for employee free choice, a group of workers aided by the National Right to Work Foundation have forced Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 49 officials to renounce their monopoly bargaining power over employees of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan (a component of the nation...
Post a Comment
Read more

Under Wolf, Pennsylvania misspent half a billion in school Medicaid funds

Few people can truly imagine what $551 million is, but that is the sum that the state of Pennsylvania either mismanaged or spent erroneously of federal Medicaid funds earmarked for schools. While they argued with the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General over this, they have not released a public statement. Money that could have helped students across the nation seems to have evaporated under then Democrat Governor Tom Wolf. Report Findings Here, via the HHS OIG report , is what they found. “Pennsylvania improperly claimed Federal funds through its Medicaid school-based health services program. Specifically, Pennsylvania claimed estimated unallowable Federal funds totaling $182.5 million because it did not support that all moments used in RMTSs and coded as Medicaid-eligible were for Medicaid-eligible health services or Medicaid administrative activities. Also, Pennsylvania improperly claimed an additional $368.9 million when it used unsupported ratios to allocate c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Imagine the implications of believably faked audio and video used against conservatives

Well, it seems that the Democrats and their various organizations have a way to falsify what is said by people via artificial intelligence.  This   is shown  by the story of what Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert in Maryland has gone through when the school Athletic Director and PE teacher Dazhon Darien used an AI program to make it sound like Eiswert was making racist and anti-Semitic rants.  There are many instances that this can be used by police to frame others, civilians can do this to people they hate, and many other ways this can be, will be, and most likely has been used. What Happened Eiswert started investigating  some   suspicious budgeting from the athletic department, along with  the removal of  a coach without the  principal’s  approval.  When Darien  started  realizing the investigation was happening and going against him, an email went out to three teachers with an audio track that was suppose...
Post a Comment
Read more