Aug 17 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to relocate the new FBI headquarters to Washington, D.C., rather than in nearby Maryland, which had been picked in 2023 to host the building.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang sided with the Democratic-led state of Maryland and Prince George’s County in ruling the administration had unlawfully scrapped a plan to construct a new FBI headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland, and diverted money approved by Congress for that project to an alternate location, the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington.

The judge said the selection of Ronald Reagan Building violated measures passed by Congress in 2022 and 2023 that required the General Services Administration to pick from one of three short-listed sites outside of Washington.

“Notably, the text provides no conditions under which the selection could be unilaterally rescinded or switched to a nonconforming site,” wrote Chuang, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama.

He said that because the administration lacked authority to pick the Ronald Reagan Building to serve as the new FBI headquarters, it likewise could not legally divert $555 million of funding approved by Congress to prepare the site for that purpose.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, in a statement said the ruling cleared the way for the headquarters project to return to Greenbelt.

“Congress made a promise,” he said. “The Trump administration tried to break it. Now, the jobs, investment, and opportunity Marylanders deserve are within reach.”

“This is not the first time courts have tried to undermine the administration in its goal to make government more cost-effective for American taxpayers,” an FBI spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters. “The court has chosen to impermissibly intervene for political reasons.”

The FBI “will continue the best course of action to meet the needs of law enforcement,” the spokesperson said.

For almost 15 years, the federal government has worked to develop plans for a new FBI headquarters and received funding from Congress for that project, which if completed would see the FBI relocate from its current location in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Congress, through a pair of laws, required the General Services Administration, which oversees the federal government’s real estate, to pick a site for the project from among three suburban locations outside of Washington: Greenbelt; Landover, Maryland; or Springfield, Virginia.

The GSA in 2023 during Democratic President Joe Biden‘s administration picked Greenbelt.

But the Trump administration scrapped those plans in July 2025 and announced plans to relocate the FBI to the existing Ronald Reagan Building, which FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials argued would be a cost-effective move that would save billions of dollars.

The Reagan building already counted among its tenants U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The U.S. Agency for International Development had also been a tenant before the Trump administration dismantled the agency last year.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Saad Sayeed)