FBI Director Kash Patel said in interview that the agency is moving out of its Washington, D.C., headquarters.

He told Fox News on Friday that the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building is unsafe for the agency’s employees.

“We want the American men and women to know if you’re gonna come work at the premier law enforcement agency in the world, we’re gonna give you a building that’s commensurate with that. And that’s not this place,” Patel said.

The FBI has been in the Hoover building since 1974, when some of the first employees to move into it arrived. Patel said the agency has 38,000 employees when fully staffed, saying there are about 11,000, or a third of the actual workforce, within a 50-mile radius of Washington.

But, Patel added, “a third of the crime doesn’t happen here, so we’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.”

Every state will be receiving a “plus-up,” according to the director, who didn’t elaborate. In turn, more Americans will feel inspired to become agents and intelligence analysts, Patel said.

“I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say, ‘we wanna go work at the FBI because we wanna go fight violent crime, and we wanna get sent out into the country to do it,’” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing. In the next three, six, nine months, we’re gonna do that hard.”

Patel told senior FBI officials in February he planned to relocate up to 1,000 employees from Washington to field offices around the country, according to the Associated Press, which cited a person with knowledge of the discussions. The FBI was also reportedly going to move an additional 500 workers to a facility in Alabama.

The news outlet quoted the agency as saying in a statement that Patel had “made clear his promise to the American public that FBI agents will be in communities focused on combatting violent crime.”

“He has directed FBI leadership to implement a plan to put this promise into action,” the agency continued, according to the Associated Press.

President Donald Trump announced in March he was halting a plan to move the FBI’s headquarters to Maryland, pledging to build “another big FBI building” in place of the Hoover building. That way, the president said, the FBI and the Department of Justice could be near each other.

Have questions, concerns or tips? Send them to Ray Lewis at rjlewis@sbgtv.com.