Blocks FBI funding bill

Van Hollen blocks FBI funding bill from floor debate over Trump headquarters dispute

The Maryland Democrat said Republicans worry the president will “throw a fit” if they meddle in his headquarters decision.

By Katherine Tully-McManus and Jennifer Scholtes

The simmering dispute over the FBI’s future headquarters derailed Senate efforts Thursday night to launch floor debate on the legislation that funds the agency, as well as the departments of Commerce and Justice, NASA and science programs.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen objected Thursday night to including the bill in a larger package of funding measures. The Maryland Democrat demanded that the Senate agree to adopt language that would require the FBI to meet a specific security threshold for its headquarters, as the Trump administration keeps the agency in downtown Washington instead of relocating it to the suburban Maryland campus previously selected after a yearslong competition.

But Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), who chairs the funding panel that handles the bill, shot down that request on the Senate floor Thursday night, after the dispute over the FBI headquarters already snagged committee action on the bill.

Tearing up as he spoke on the floor, Moran said he knows “no path forward” that would allow Van Hollen’s amendment. “Our appropriations process is fragile,” he said.

If Van Hollen, who serves as the ranking member on the Commerce-Justice-Science Subcommittee, hadn’t objected, his amendment would have been teed up for a vote. But Van Hollen didn’t want to take the risk that the language would not have been adopted.

“That is a simple request that I would have thought all of us could stand behind,” Van Hollen said, “making sure that the new headquarters of the men and women of the FBI meets the security requirements that we and they have set out.”

Senate appropriators already killed another amendment Van Hollen proposed in committee, which would have barred the Trump administration from dipping into a $1.4 billion construction account for anything besides relocating the FBI to the previously selected site. After the proposal was initially adopted, the committee later voted to strike the language because so many Republicans were threatening to tank the underlying bill if it rebuked Trump on the headquarters decision.

“We did it because the president of the United States was going to throw a fit if that provision stayed on, that’s why people reversed the position,” Van Hollen said on the Senate floor Thursday night. “And we shouldn’t make our decisions out of fear about what somebody in the White House is going to do, because that distorts the entire process here in the United States Senate.”

Moran’s Thursday evening request was to tie together four bills to fund the government for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Those bills would collectively fund the departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture, as well as military construction projects, the operations of Congress and the FDA. The Kansas Republican touted that those four measures had made it through the full Senate Appropriations Committee with bipartisan support and “in some instances, unanimously.”