The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building is seen on Jan. 28, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The decade-long endeavor to move the Federal Bureau of Investigation out of its crumbling headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., and into a new facility outside the city could face roadblocks next year.

President-elect Donald Trump and some of his top allies in Congress have rebuked the federal agency that undertook the search for a new suburban location, ultimately deciding on Greenbelt, Maryland, over two other options.

Once Trump is back in the Oval Office and the GOP controls both chambers of Congress, the funding stream for the General Services Administration to build the new facility could end.

Republican lawmakers could also require the GSA to restart the search process, change the criteria the federal agency used to select the Greenbelt location, or simply tell the agency it must construct the new headquarters in a different location. Other options floated by GOP lawmakers include Alabama and somewhere inside the District of Columbia. Or they could require GSA to build the new FBI headquarters in either Springfield, Virginia, or Landover, Maryland — the other two locations considered for the new building.

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the spending panel that controls GSA’s budget, told States Newsroom he believes the issue is settled, in part, because some funding has already been allocated for the project.

“We’re going to work very hard to make sure we keep the program on track,” Van Hollen said. “I think there’s a consensus that the FBI’s current headquarters does not meet the security requirements, does not meet the other requirements. So, you know, from our perspective, a decision has been made and we will work hard to make sure it’s executed, implemented.”

Construction funding

Congress approved $200 million for the headquarters project this spring as part of a much larger government spending package.

Beyond that, funding is less certain.

The Senate Appropriations Committee, controlled by Democrats, has proposed $375 million for construction in this year’s GSA spending bill. That measure, which includes numerous other funding proposals, received bipartisan support during a committee vote. In January, control of the Senate will flip to the GOP.

The House version of the bill, drafted by Republicans, doesn’t include any funding for a new FBI headquarters and would require the GSA to send Congress “a detailed plan and timeline to support the District of Columbia based personnel by keeping the current FBI headquarters operational or identifying another Federally owned location in the District of Columbia that can serve as the FBI headquarters building.”

The two chambers will likely negotiate a final, bicameral version of the bill during the first few months of next year, once the GOP holds unified control of Congress and the White House. 

Trump hotel

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said during an interview he hadn’t really thought about whether his state could become the new site for the FBI headquarters.

“If you just go by history, Trump didn’t want to put any money into a new FBI headquarters,” Kaine said. “He didn’t want that block that the FBI is on to be cleared and opened for a hotel that might compete with his own hotel. So four years of the Trump administration was him basically doing everything he could to stop a move and to stop funds being used for the move.

“Now he may not have the same financial interest that he had back then so I bet it’s hard to say.”

Trump owned a hotel in the old Post Office building along Pennsylvania Avenue during his first term in office, but it was later sold and is now a Waldorf Astoria. The building is about one block away from the current FBI headquarters.

Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the top Democrat on the House panel that funds the GSA, told States Newsroom there’s “no doubt” the Greenbelt location “is the best site, both in terms of security and in terms of finances.”

“I’m going to continue to push that position,” Hoyer said. “We need to get this done for the FBI, for the American people. The building is literally falling down. And the fact that we have delayed this … is testament that we’ve escalated cost, decreased security for the federal employees at FBI, and we ought to move on. And hopefully we will.”

The Maryland and Virginia governors’ offices declined to comment for this article. A GSA representative, speaking on background, said the agency has submitted a report to Congress that was required by the spending package lawmakers approved in March 2022.

GSA, the person said, is trying to secure “resolutions” from congressional committees before it obligates funds to buy the site or begin design and construction activities. They said this is consistent with other large-scale development projects that require congressional approval. It was not clear what those resolutions would say.

Evaluation of selection process continues

The GSA has been under review by its inspector general for how it undertook the site selection process for more than a year, one factor that could potentially complicate things during unified Republican control of Washington.

GSA acting Inspector General Robert Erickson launched an evaluation into the agency’s process in November 2023, a few weeks after GSA announced its decision to pick the Greenbelt, Maryland, location.

That evaluation is ongoing, and the inspector general continues “to work thoroughly and expeditiously on the project,” according to a spokesperson.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner told States Newsroom in a brief interview he’s waiting to see the inspector general’s evaluation before deciding on a path forward.

“I know people thought that it might come out in the spring. It didn’t,” Warner said. “The reports we’ve got is that they’re still doing the investigating, and let’s see what that says first.”

Hoyer said he doesn’t expect the results of that evaluation will affect moving the FBI headquarters to Greenbelt.

“I think everything was done absolutely as it should have been,” Hoyer said. “An argument was made by both sides in public on the merits of their sites.”

Debate over process

FBI Director Christopher Wray also questioned the decision last year, writing in a letter to employees that he and others held “concerns about the fairness and transparency in the process,” though he wrote those “concerns are not with the decision itself but with the process.”

Trump has announced he will name Kash Patel as head of the FBI, though Wray would have to be fired or quit first. Trump has not yet named someone to lead the GSA.

The Greenbelt decision brought about some bipartisanship in Congress, with House Oversight & Accountability Committee Chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, and Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, urging GSA to conduct a full investigation into the site selection process. 

The two said the most disturbing aspect to them was that then-GSA Commissioner of the Public Building Service Nina Albert “overturned the unanimous site decision of an expert panel of civil servants representing GSA and its agency client, the FBI.”

Albert left that role on Oct. 13, 2023, about a month before the final decision was announced. General Services Administrator Robin Carnahan had also said two years earlier Albert didn’t have a conflict of interest.

“Congress created GSA in 1949 to increase the efficiency and economy of federal government operations — not least the procurement and use of property,” Comer and Connolly wrote in their letter. “To fulfill that mission, GSA must be fair and transparent in its operations. Its real estate dealings should consider only what is best for taxpayers and the Nation. It must set aside political or parochial interests.”

Comer and Connolly added they were “deeply concerned that GSA’s choice of a new FBI headquarters site departed from those principles — and in doing so, failed to put taxpayers and the public interest first.”

Dogecoin. In the week after the 2024 presidential election, the coin’s value jumped 250%. (Image: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Rockets aren’t the only thing Elon Musk is sending into the stratosphere.

After a three-year plummet, dogecoin is blasting off again, jumping 250% since the election of Donald Trump – part of a broader wave of optimism in the industry, due to Trump’s courting of crypto advocates during his campaign.

Trump’s informal appointment of Musk to what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency – D.O.G.E for short – also helped pump the dog-themed meme coin.

This isn’t the first time Musk, who styles himself as “the Dogefather,” has fueled interest in dogecoin.

In May 2021, its price shot up in anticipation of Musk’s guest appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” During one skit, Musk played a financial analyst in conversation with a Weekend Update host, who repeatedly asked him, “What is dogecoin?” After some obfuscation, Musk’s character finally admitted that it was a hustle. The price of the coin went into a freefall. Just over a year later, it had shed over 90% of its peak value.

The losses hit small investors hard. In 2022, one of them filed a class action lawsuit against Musk for market manipulation and insider trading, though the case was dismissed in August 2024.

Why has dogecoin – a meme coin that was never meant to be taken seriously as an investment – seen such extreme swings in value?

We’re all in this together

Dogecoin was launched in 2013 to spoof bitcoin and a slew of other cryptocurrencies that were claiming to disrupt the traditional world of finance. Two strangers from across the globe met online, copied the code of an existing coin, and branded it with the already popular Doge internet meme – a picture of a Shiba Inu dog surrounded by fragments of broken English: “wow much coin.”

Although their main goal was to make the coin pointless and undesirable, it became one of the most popular and enduring cryptocurrencies on the market.

Following dogecoin’s previous surge in 2021, I studied how its fervent network of influencers and everyday investors worked together to draw tremendous attention – and capital – to the joke currency.

Elon Musk’s 2021 appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ caused the price of dogecoin to tumble.

To understand the appeal of these absurd investments, you have to look at the time and energy that users invest into these networks and the rewards, both financial and social, they get in return.

Meme coins are collaborative enterprises. Members of these online communities have an economic incentive to become outspoken boosters: The more the value of dogecoin rises, the more their investments grow. But they also receive social validation from other meme coin investors when they pump up the coin.

In other words, behind every meme coin is a collective of strangers on a communal mission to make more money.

Dogecoin and its imitators have been described by their leadership as crypto movements, shared journeys and community-owned projects. Beyond branding the assets with culturally resonant images, whether it’s a Shiba Inu dog or Pepe the Frog, successful crypto ventures are characterized by complex webs of trust. Trust in the technology. Trust in its potential for future appreciation. And trust that those holding power in the networks won’t exploit the rest.

This loyalty is woven among a global network of users who collaborate around the clock to promote their coin and demonstrate their unwavering commitment to its success.

In times of price appreciation, the collective buzzes with elation.

During price dips, community members mutually reinforce their comrades’ – and their own – beliefs that this is just a bump in the road and that their collective efforts will eventually lead to a handsome payoff. Even in the coldest of crypto winters, this ritualistic behavior helps these speculative communities endure. Community serves as a substitute for financial loss.

The investment strategies in these communities – and the conviction in their payoff – involve repeating and reposting what others have said, like any traditional internet meme.

Trolling traditional valuation

The real value of meme coins cannot be understood in the same way as traditional assets, such as stocks and physical commodities. These types of assets have fundamentals, such as a company’s financial statements, or public demand for basic goods, from coffee to oil.

Conversely, the fundamentals of meme coins are reflected in their network activity, such as daily active users, and less concrete metrics, such as social sentiment and mindshare – how much public awareness a coin has generated compared with its rivals.

Of course, the valuations of traditional assets are also affected by these social factors. The difference is that meme coins offer little by way of productive activity. They add nothing to the economy. Occasionally, their leadership will build financial services around them, but these are generally added as afterthoughts, especially as a way to drum up more speculative excitement.

Meme coins troll the traditional conventions of valuation and mock the edicts and dogmas of mainstream investors.

And that’s exactly the point.

Participation in meme coin communities – or any crypto community, for that matter – entails embracing an alternative economic experience. They are speculative sandboxes for playing outside of the conventional rules of investment.

Who let the Doge out?

Musk is the quintessential meme coin influencer.

As the richest man in the world, he’s viewed by many as a paragon of savvy investing. His massive following extends far beyond dogecoin’s social network. And his promotional efforts are playful – so playful that the judge in his class-action case dismissed his dogecoin tweets as mere “puffery” and that “no reasonable investor could rely upon them.”

Dogecoin previously reached the peak of its memetic momentum when Musk appeared on “Saturday Night Live.” Now, instead of sitting at the Weekend Update news desk cracking jokes, he’s sitting in Trump’s office advising the president-elect. In other words, dogecoin’s memetic resonance has ascended from pop culture to politics, helping it capture a bigger slice of the public’s mindshare.

While dogecoin has specifically benefited from Musk’s proximity to Trump, the broader crypto market is leaping with optimism for a crypto-friendly administration. Speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in July, the GOP candidate ensured he’d make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet.” After pouring $131 million into this election cycle, the crypto industry can now claim 274 pro-crypto members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 20 pro-crypto U.S. senators.

Between Musk buddying up with Trump and a shifting regulatory environment, the dog can once again run free.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A ‘For Sale’ sign is seen on March 19 in Austin, Texas. Policymakers are watching for indications of what President-elect Donald Trump plans to do to ease housing costs next year after an election where voters were laser-focused on the economy.

Americans hand over a huge chunk of their paycheck for a roof over their heads. Policymakers are looking out for indications of what President-elect Donald Trump plans to do to ease housing costs next year after an election where voters were laser-focused on the economy.

Housing accounted for 32.9% of consumers’ spending in 2023, making it the largest share of consumer expenditures, according to the most recently available data Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that was an increase of 5.7% from 2022.

This year, many Americans still struggle to find affordable housing, whether they choose to rent or buy a home.

There’s a lot economists and housing advocates still don’t know about what to expect from a second Trump term. It’s unclear which campaign promises will find their way into administrative rules or  legislation, even with a Republican trifecta – the GOP will control the White House and both chambers of Congress.

But policy experts, researchers and economic analysts are looking at Trump’s record, his recent remarks on housing, and  Project 2025 – the conservative Heritage Foundation’s 900-page plan to overhaul the executive branch – for a glimpse of what may lie ahead.

Tariffs and the cost of building homes

Trump has spoken frequently of his proposed 60% tariff on goods from China, which he has said would create more manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Tariffs could be as high as 20% on goods from other countries.

But housing economists and other experts say that could be bad news for building more affordable housing.

Selma Hepp, chief economist for CoreLogic, a financial services company, said tariffs are one of her main concerns about the effects of a second Trump term.

“One of the biggest concerns is not just lumber [costs], but the overall cost of materials, which have been going up,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist for CoreLogic, a financial services company.

Construction material prices have risen 38.8% since February 2020, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors’ analysis of October Producer Price Index data.

Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning in the department of planning and landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said building costs are already high from tariffs on Canadian lumber that Trump first imposed and that the Biden administration kept and increased.

“It used to be in construction that you would get a bid from a contractor or a subcontractor or supplier and it would be good for 60 days. Now, the bids are good for like five days because you don’t know where prices are going to be,” he said.

Immigration policy and its effect on construction labor

Trump tweeted on Nov. 18 that he is planning to use the declaration of a national emergency as part of his mass  deportation plan.

Besides disrupting lives, Trump’s plan  could have effects on what it costs to build housing, Hepp said.

“There is the cost of labor as well, if we do indeed have all these deportations. That’s a big, big concern,” she said. “A large share of labor in the construction industry obviously comes from immigrants. That is a huge issue for new construction and particularly new construction as it relates to affordable housing.”

Foreign-born construction workers made up 3 million of the 11.9 million people who work in the construction industry in 2023, according to the latest American Community Survey data.

Trump’s ‘not in my backyard’  rhetoric

The former president hasn’t always been clear on where he stands with zoning regulations and making way for more affordable housing in a wide variety of neighborhoods.

In a July Bloomberg interview, Trump spoke critically of zoning regulations and said that they drive up housing costs. But Trump also has a record of tending toward a “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, approach to housing that maintained some of these zoning regulations. The Trump administration moved to roll back an Obama-era regulation that tied HUD funding to assessing and reducing housing discrimination in neighborhoods.

“He’ll talk about reducing regulations on developers, but he’ll also use this NIMBYism talking about protecting suburbs from low-income housing and you really can’t have it both ways,” said Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Paulsen said Project 2025 embraces a pushback against anti-NIMBY approaches to expand multi-family housing.

“What I read in the Project 2025 documents is a clear statement that says every local community and neighborhood should be able to choose the housing it wants to accept or not. The challenge of that is that if every community in every neighborhood can veto housing, then we just don’t get enough housing and prices go up and prices and rents go up,” he said.

A more punitive approach to homelessness 

Last year, homelessness rose to its highest level recorded since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began collecting this information in 2007. The ending of pandemic safety nets that gave some households better financial stability and a lack of affordable housing supply contributed to the number of unhoused people, the report explained.

Trump has been outspoken on his view that homeless people should be “off our streets.” The president-elect has also proposed putting unhoused people with mental health issues into “mental institutions.”

“There’s a movement that I think is largely reflected in Project 2025 that says, actually, cities need more coercive policy tools to enforce public order and to require that someone who’s camping take a shelter placement even if they don’t want it,” Paulsen said.

Saadian said that given the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which makes it easier to criminalize unhoused populations for sleeping outside, she’s worried about a changing political environment where policies that prioritize stable housing over policing fall out of favor.

“I think all of that just shows a culture shift in the political dynamic here that we’re definitely worried about,” she said.

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Hundreds of immigrant rights advocates and others participate in rally and demonstration at the Federal Building in lower Manhattan on June 1, 2018 in New York. In coordinated marches across the country people gathered outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices, U.S. attorney's offices, and the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Spencer Platt | Getty Images).

The week before Thanksgiving, I spoke with an immigration attorney in Madison, Grant Sovern, who helped found the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC) — part of a flurry of new services created in the wake of the 2018 ICE raids that terrorized Dane County during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration. No one knows what the immigration crackdown Trump has promised for his second term will look like. But advocates are once again meeting to try to prepare.

Sovern told me about desperate calls from friends of his college-age daughter — students who are worried about losing their protected status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). While he has been offering them hope that the new administration won’t start by targeting Dreamers, who grew up in this country and just want to continue to study and work here, he added that the easiest targets for mass deportation are other people who’ve followed the rules. Asylum-seekers and those with temporary protected status and work visas — like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that Trump and incoming Vice President J.D. Vance falsely accused of eating their neighbors’ pets — will be the easiest to find.

What an ominous holiday season. We need the warmth of gatherings with friends and family more than ever. But it’s a weird time to be celebrating the arrival of our nation’s first immigrants and the mythical meal where they bonded with Native Americans before swiping their land and wiping them out. Talking about colonialism, genocide and how our society is built on historic injustice is quickly dismissed as “woke” and out of fashion these days. But it’s unavoidable if you’re trying to understand the rise of right-wing authoritarianism here and around the globe.

The same week I spoke with Sovern about preparations in Dane County to counter Trump’s mass deportations, Israeli peace activist Rotem Levin came to Madison with his Palestinian peace movement colleague Osama Iliwat to speak out against the war in Gaza and to discuss their vision for “a path to shared safety, justice and liberation,” according to the promotional materials from Jewish Voice for Peace, Vets for Peace and a handful of local religious groups that brought them to the Presbyterian church near my house.

I met Levin at the home of a neighbor who hosted the pair (Iliwat was resting, feeling unwell after their trip). Levin said their goal was to get people to stop being “sleepy” about the occupation and the hopelessness of the seemingly endless war on Palestinians by his country, supported by the U.S.

“We’re not like you – you genocided all the Native Americans and now they have to accept you,” Levin said with startling Israeli frankness. “We’re in the Middle East. There are Muslims all around us. The only way to guarantee safety and security is by building trust.”

Of the recent U.S. election, he said, “I want to encourage you. We have been living with dictatorship for 20 years. You will be OK.”

People who have been living comfortably with the thought that they are part of a democracy, protected by the rule of law, are not the ones who need to be afraid, he added. In the U.S., “people without papers” are the most vulnerable, like the Palestinians in Israel, he said. His parents, among other Israelis, have been shocked by his country’s rapid slide into fascism under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu and his right-wing cabinet. For his mother, who suddenly doesn’t recognize her country, and for his father, who was beaten at a protest march, the shift to militarism and the crushing of free speech was unthinkable until recently. For his Palestinian friends, however, repression is a familiar fact of life. His message is that security depends on justice for everyone.

Levin was not keen to talk about the daunting project of finding a political solution to the conflict. He didn’t want to get bogged down in arguments about the details, he said. Focusing on the small things, building personal, humanizing connections between Israelis and Palestinians, is critically important, even if there is no big-picture solution on the horizon yet. 

The same approach applies here, on the cusp on the next Trump administration.

Community leaders and immigration attorneys have been meeting in Madison to try to figure out what to do. Local funding has dried up since the first Trump term. CILC lacks adequate resources and doesn’t have enough volunteer lawyers to respond to the crisis advocates see coming. And they don’t even know what shape that crisis will take. The prospect that the Trump administration will likely do away with its own practice, in the first administration, of not conducting raids in churches and schools “sends shivers down everybody’s spine,” Sovern said.

Mass raids like the 2018 ICE operations that shut down local restaurants could be scaled up, and could cause huge economic harm, especially for Wisconsin dairy farms where an estimated 70% of the workforce is comprised of undocumented immigrants.

But raiding isolated farms in rural areas of the state wouldn’t make the kind of news splash Trump is probably seeking. To achieve that effect, Democratic cities like Madison could be in the crosshairs. Instead of dropping busloads of migrants off in liberal northern cities, the publicity stunt gleefully executed by Republican Govs. Greg Abbot of Texas and Ron Desantis of Florida, the Trump administration could send in buses to round people up, crashing local economies by emptying out restaurants and other businesses that depend on an immigrant workforce.

According to The Hill, Texas has offered the incoming Trump administration 1,400 acres to build a mass deportation detention camp. 

In Madison, immigrant rights groups and local officials have begun trying to calm people down.

After the 2018 ICE raids, advocates hosted an information session to offer legal advice and “the only thing anyone wanted to ask was, ‘Who will pick up my kids from school if I’m deported?’” Sovern recalled.  

There is a lot to worry about, including the bill that recently passed the U.S. House allowing the federal government to designate U.S. nonprofits “terrorist supporting” organizations and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

But it’s also important to remember that, under current law, “they can’t do all the bad things they want to do all at once,” Sovern said.

He pointed to an evaluation of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation. (CILC, in Madison, was the second such effort.) The project provided lawyers to all low-income immigrants facing deportation proceedings in New York City. Before the project, only 4% of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48%. 

And despite polls showing increasing public support for mass deportations, even in the current amped-up anti-immigrant climate, most Americans (about 64%) say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country if they meet certain conditions including applying for citizenship, working, paying taxes and not committing crimes.

People are more sympathetic if they hear the stories of real people who are affected by deportation threats, not just the lies about violent criminals who are eating pets.

It’s also important to spread the word that there are good people trying to hold up a light in the darkness. As Sovern puts it, “What we can do are little bits of tons of hard work.” 

Even if it’s impossible to solve the big problem all at once, brave people are doing their best to lead us to a better future.

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