Secretary Blinken inaugurates new facility at State Dept. training center in Arlington

(Updated 10/26/23) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken inaugurated a 200,000-square-foot building at the Arlington-based National Foreign Affairs Training Center yesterday.

The $121.2 million, federally funded facility, dubbed “Building B,” opened in 2022. It aims to expand the training center’s capacity, which has seen a surge in recruitment over the last two years, according to State Department officials.

“Building B has vastly increased the Foreign Service Institute’s workspace, creating hundreds of new areas where students and instructors can come together for classes, breakout sessions, large format meetings,” Blinken said during the dedication ceremony on Monday.

Located on S. George Mason Drive in the Alcova Heights neighborhood, the training center is the primary training ground for U.S. diplomats and foreign affairs professionals, offering courses in languages and international relations.

Since 2020, the student body has increased by nearly 30%, said Joan Polaschik, the director of the Foreign Service Institute.

“We are engaged in the largest hiring surge in more than a decade,” she told ARLnow following the ceremony.

This surge forced the training center to use State Department offices in Rosslyn to accommodate the overflow of students, according to FSI.

The State Department has seven other buildings in Arlington, home to bureaus such as Diplomatic Security and the Office of the Inspector General. More than 5,000 full-time employees and contractors work across these offices.

The new Building B, which serves a total of 3,679 in-person and online students, should alleviate this overflow issue, according to FSI. The campus has seen its daily in-person student capacity increase by 25%, going from 650 to 1,100.

Building B is home to FSI, the Consular Training Division, School of Professional and Area Studies and Leadership and Management School.

“The new Building B will eliminate the need for both of these spaces in Rosslyn and consolidate language studies in one place — our Arlington campus,” the FSI spokesman said.

Other planned expansion efforts resulted in the closure of a walking trail, despite efforts from some residents to save it, though these were unrelated to Building B, the spokesman later clarified. Plans for Building B were approved in 2020.

During his remarks, Blinken — who lives in Arlington — said the new building serves as a much-needed asset, amid growing tensions between the United States and other global superpowers, such as Russia and China, as well as conflicts in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine.

“It is essential that we empower our workforce with the skills and training that they need to operate in a crisis like this and to meet any challenge that comes our way,” he said. “So today, I’m really happy to mark the significant step forward toward that mission.”