by WorldTribune Staff, February 19, 2023
SWAMP WATCH
It was announced earlier this month that U.S. taxpayers will foot the bill for a planned multi-billion dollar new headquarters for the FBI. The new home for the bureau would be twice the size of the Pentagon.
But does moving the politicized FBI to a shiny, new building accomplish anything? Some say take a wrecking ball not only to the current decrepit headquarters in Washington, D.C. but to the bureau itself.
Harvey Silverglate, the co-founder The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told CBN News in October: “Abolish it and start over … a new name, new agents, new leadership.”
Former FBI Special Agent Eric Caron added: “The FBI needs a thorough colonoscopy, quite frankly. A blue-ribbon panel needs to study them and dissect them and get rid of the cancer.”
Caron says eliminating the FBI would not be a loss; Its workload could be given to other federal agencies.
“There’s Secret Service, the U.S. Marshal Service, Homeland Security, ATF and DEA. If we don’t do that, then there needs to be a cleansing of the FBI for the American people to regain trust,” Caron said.
Related: Beast: New FBI HQ would be twice size of Pentagon and devoted to ‘equity’, February 6, 2023
“The FBI’s 1960s fortress-on-stilts in downtown Washington, D.C., is a brutalist eyesore that is now crumbling from obsolescence and poor maintenance,” J. Michael Waller wrote for American Greatness on Feb. 16.
“Which brings us to the point: Does the United States want or need an FBI that functions the way it now does? If not, why build a new FBI headquarters?”
Waller noted that, with Republicans now in control of the House and the power of the purse, several questions need to be answered before Congress appropriates any new funding for the FBI:
• Why does the FBI need a new headquarters complex so huge that it will dwarf the Pentagon?
• Is the FBI, with its top-heavy management and bloated personnel rolls, people who self-promote through a system that creates artificial demand for their work, too large already?
• Does the nation even want or need an FBI to continue operating business as usual?
• Does the FBI leadership still have the public’s trust?
• Have the FBI’s top executives tried to maintain or repair that trust by cooperating fully with the people’s elected representatives who execute congressional oversight?
• Has the FBI become a politicized enforcement arm of a super-politicized Department of Justice? If so, is it in the public interest that such an enforcement arm, and its personnel, remain physically close to the center of political power?
• Should headquarters be moved to another part of the country to reduce that politicization?
• Has the FBI morphed from an American law-enforcement agency into a European-style domestic intelligence apparat with police powers against the citizen?
• Is the century-old bureau even needed any more? Is it time for the FBI to go the way of America’s heroic first centralized intelligence entity, the Office of Strategic Services, in favor of something fresh with a new mission and ethos?
• Should America have a big, centralized domestic state security machine in the first place? Is such a committee for state security even constitutional?
• Could the FBI’s useful functions serve the public better if they were shifted to other agencies, and even in some cases returned to the individual states?
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Beast, Part II: Critics say why not defund the FBI? added by Editor Two on
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