(The Center Square) — As a follow-up to the hearing held last week on the General Services Administration’s controversial selection of a site for the new FBI headquarters, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure sent out requests for more information to two key members of the agency and the director of the FBI.
“What specific steps did you take to ensure you did not have a conflict of interest as you evaluated and selected the site owned by your previous employer?” the committee asked in its letter to Nina Albert, the official who ultimately made the selection.
“Over the last decade, has a political appointee at GSA been appointed the Site Selection Authority for the FBI HQ project or other GSA capital projects?” the committee asked in its letter to GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan.
These are just some of the unanswered questions, but the hearing established several prior claims as fact.
It established that the GSA, the federal agency tasked with managing government buildings and real estate, went against recommendations in selecting a site in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the new FBI headquarters.
It confirmed that Nina Albert, a Biden-administration appointee to her role at the GSA as Commissioner of the Public Buildings Service, served as the site selection authority, the person responsible for making the final decision. Before taking a position with the GSA, Albert had worked for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the owner of the Greenbelt property.
The hearing also confirmed that the price of the Greenbelt property was, at one time, over $200 million, which was reduced to $26 million by the time the decision was made.
What signaled the need for a hearing were the FBI’s expressed concerns that Albert was not operating as a neutral, objective party, given her ties to the transit authority; during the hearing, the committee also questioned whether political objectives and pressures had interfered with the selection process, promoting considerations like equity and sustainability to the detriment of the FBI’s mission.
The committee’s letters asked for copies of all communication regarding site selection for the new headquarters dating back to January 2021 from nearly a dozen parties — the FBI, GSA, Department of Justice, the White House, Office of Management and Budget, National Security Council, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, owners of the properties and the Maryland and Virginia coalitions that jockeyed for selection.
In addition, the committee asked a series of explicit and pointed questions of Albert, Carnahan and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“In your role at WMATA, did you have any involvement related to the offer of the Greenbelt site for the FBI Headquarters project?” it asked Albert.
In her time at WMATA, Albert served as the director of real estate and station planning, as well as the vice president of real estate and parking, though she started two years after the GSA had already narrowed its list to Greenbelt and Landover, Maryland and Springfield, Virginia.
The committee asked Wray about the FBI’s knowledge of the changing costs of the Greenbelt site and Carnahan and whether the GSA consulted “third-party experts” for appraisals of the Maryland and Virginia sites.
The recipients are to get back to the committee by Jan. 2.
