"The General Services Administration announced Tuesday that it will begin selling off some of the federal government’s most recognizable office buildings, including the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which serves as the FBI headquarters in Washington, and the Robert F. Kennedy Building, home to the Department of Justice — a landmark shift in how the government manages its real estate portfolio."
> GSA may not sell all of the offices. The agency said in its statement that it “welcomes creative solutions, including sale-lease backs, ground leases and other forms of public/private partnerships to drive the full optimization of our space.”
Selling the property only to rent it back, eh? The properties under consideration for sale include agency headquarters (HHS, GSA, DOL, DOJ, FBI), and not to mention scientific facilities (FDA), and unless Musk and Trump intend to fully close those departments or to make these departments remote-first...
Back towards the end of his first term, Trump started moving a lot of agencies out of DC. I think BLM was headed to Colorado etc. IIRC there was also talk of moving FDA back then.
This type of arrangement isn't novel. Property is high and the space is underutilized. Sell high, lease the fraction that you need, and have the option to buy back at the end of the contract (often with the right of first refusal.)
On your second point: it does look like there are going to be significantly fewer federal employees, so unless there are also going to be big relocation programs, most of these places are going to continue to be under capacity. It's not in anyone's interest to have these places locked up, especially in urban cores.
edit: as usual, I'm curious what my error is here. Please explain. Thanks.
Unbelievable that they'll be selling the federal buildings in downtown Chicago in this property market. Very short-sighted to give up those prime locations in a fire sale.
I don't think the parent is saying that. I think the idea is that if you have two buildings with utilization of less than 50%, you move people in one single building and sell the other one.
Every action should be assumed to be as short-sighted as the American President’s attention span.
The people who articulated a more complex and nuanced strategy didn’t get any traction. We’re left with those who want chaos, power grabs, and fantasies of a hemispheric empire.
The US really is losing the Cold War. It just lost async.
Edit: it's also to destroy the institutions by making it harder to rehire and house people after the firings are done, as pointed out by someone else here.
I assume this is to let private corporations hold the government hostage in perpetuity and charge arbitrary amounts of money? Because the government would have no leverage in negotiating a lower rent? And if this prevents it from functioning, then even better?
OPs point is funnily accurate if you’d like to consider a certain ‘real-estate’ person in government could stand to benefit from the buildings being sold at the lowest price (recovering market) and that same person people will likely be friends with the buyers (lots of negotiating power).
They never mentioned whether it’d actually be beneficial for the government.
Can’t wait for all of our federal agency buildings to be named after different members of the Trump family once they’ve changed hands! /s
Why would they be able to charge arbitrary amounts of money? The Federal Government owns 37 million square feet of office space in the DC area. Out of 370 million square feet of total office space in the region.
According to the article:
> A White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions said that the structures GSA plans to offload “all have building repairs that would be cheaper to sell than fix.”
I don't know if you're familiar with the commercial real estate market in D.C., but the market has tanked completely. 50-year old buildings (like the Hoover building) are basically worthless and are being torn down.
Anyone planning on this might want to consider that particularly after a Supreme Court decision a decade or so ago, the feds can exercise eminent domain for almost trivial reasons.
They also might want to consider that the sales could potentially be later determined to have been part of an illegal liquidation of a government agency - or even treason - and find themselves with nothing.
> They also might want to consider that the sales could potentially be later determined to have been part of an illegal liquidation of a government agency - or even treason - and find themselves with nothing.
You really think that’s going to happen with the current SCOTUS majority? Even if a lower court ruled that way, you think the Roberts court is going to uphold it? And absent radical schemes like “court packing”, conservatives have got SCOTUS locked up for years, even decades, to come
If we can’t restore the constitutional apportionment of power between the federal and state governments—and it seems like that ship has sailed—the next best thing would be to decentralize the federal government and get as much of it out of DC as possible: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/moving-fede...
Then wtf are they listing the main federal building in Seattle and for many agencies in the NW. Please stop spraying your same opinion all over this discussion.
Perhaps we could decentralize most offices and drop the cost of maintaining their buildings entirely. Maybe people could live where they work, work from home if you will.
It is a perfect plan when you are trying institutionally destroy oversight mechanisms. Fire the people and sell the buildings they worked in. Create maximal damage and work to restore oversight. It's actually quite brilliant, even though it is evil.
> The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy blueprint crafted by former Trump administration officials, states that “COVID made telework ubiquitous, but the law and regulations are still stuck in an era when telework was unique.”
And yet we have stories like "Federal workers ordered to return to offices without desks, Wi-Fi and lights":
So at the same time we have the administration saying "RTO" and the admin's playbook people saying (in the past?) "we have RTO, why do we need space?".
The FBI HQ had a lot of interesting accomodations due to the secure nature of the work there. Who could take it over and use those features? A defense contractor I guess?
That building specifically has been targeted as a tear-down for a long time. It's truly a shitty building and the FBI has been trying to relocate for years. If they succeed in selling it, it will get knocked down.
I looked up one of the ones in Dallas and have been inside it. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy the Dallas buildings, they should just be demolished.
> After an earlier version of this story published, the “non-core” properties was updated to exclude all Washington buildings and dozens in Maryland in Virginia that were previously included. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about why the changes were made.
The initial list included a bunch of HQ buildings that made no sense to sell. For example the Department of Justice is always going to need a headquarters and it should always be within the District of Columbia to exclude state interference.
And it's not like tons of DC commercial real estate companies are flush with capital to buy old federal buildings downtown right now.
Great, making sure that the US government will be on the hook for exorbitant rents, even long after Trump is gone. The party of "government can't do anything right, because I'll make it so" strikes again.
>“We can no longer assume that funding will materialize to fix these longstanding issues.”
This is blatantly disingenuous. An administration that is doing pretty much as it pleases with hardly a check, with friendly majorities in both houses of Congress, claiming powerlessness? Please. And how is selling these facilities going to solve the problem? Do they really expect us to believe buyers will somehow fix these problems for free?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadSelling the FBI and DOJ Headquarters. You can view the list yourself, https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-pr...
https://archive.is/PpMp0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson_Federal_Build...
Selling the property only to rent it back, eh? The properties under consideration for sale include agency headquarters (HHS, GSA, DOL, DOJ, FBI), and not to mention scientific facilities (FDA), and unless Musk and Trump intend to fully close those departments or to make these departments remote-first...
On your second point: it does look like there are going to be significantly fewer federal employees, so unless there are also going to be big relocation programs, most of these places are going to continue to be under capacity. It's not in anyone's interest to have these places locked up, especially in urban cores.
edit: as usual, I'm curious what my error is here. Please explain. Thanks.
How long should the government keep paying for the upkeep while badly using it?
Are we also assuming the government will not need that space in the future? What happens then?
Paying someone to make a profit on property at the government's expense is not efficient.
The people who articulated a more complex and nuanced strategy didn’t get any traction. We’re left with those who want chaos, power grabs, and fantasies of a hemispheric empire.
Damn we had those? Where?
The US really is losing the Cold War. It just lost async.
Edit: it's also to destroy the institutions by making it harder to rehire and house people after the firings are done, as pointed out by someone else here.
so federal government has plenty of negotiating power
also with layoffs the space requirements may have changed and such large buildings may be excessive
> so federal government has plenty of negotiating power
You have this backward. The government is trying to sell. If real estate is still recovering (aka down) then they don't have much negotiating power.
Buyer's market.
They never mentioned whether it’d actually be beneficial for the government.
Can’t wait for all of our federal agency buildings to be named after different members of the Trump family once they’ve changed hands! /s
keeping a lot of buildings cost a lot of money so even if they're sold at lower than expected prices saves money long term
According to the article:
> A White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions said that the structures GSA plans to offload “all have building repairs that would be cheaper to sell than fix.”
I don't know if you're familiar with the commercial real estate market in D.C., but the market has tanked completely. 50-year old buildings (like the Hoover building) are basically worthless and are being torn down.
They also might want to consider that the sales could potentially be later determined to have been part of an illegal liquidation of a government agency - or even treason - and find themselves with nothing.
You really think that’s going to happen with the current SCOTUS majority? Even if a lower court ruled that way, you think the Roberts court is going to uphold it? And absent radical schemes like “court packing”, conservatives have got SCOTUS locked up for years, even decades, to come
The current administration has added far more properties to the list, including major headquarters buildings.
It doesn't make sense to sell the HQs and make everyone RTO at the same time.
> The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy blueprint crafted by former Trump administration officials, states that “COVID made telework ubiquitous, but the law and regulations are still stuck in an era when telework was unique.”
And yet we have stories like "Federal workers ordered to return to offices without desks, Wi-Fi and lights":
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43253562
So at the same time we have the administration saying "RTO" and the admin's playbook people saying (in the past?) "we have RTO, why do we need space?".
28 U.S. Code § 3002 (15)(A)
The initial list included a bunch of HQ buildings that made no sense to sell. For example the Department of Justice is always going to need a headquarters and it should always be within the District of Columbia to exclude state interference.
And it's not like tons of DC commercial real estate companies are flush with capital to buy old federal buildings downtown right now.
This is blatantly disingenuous. An administration that is doing pretty much as it pleases with hardly a check, with friendly majorities in both houses of Congress, claiming powerlessness? Please. And how is selling these facilities going to solve the problem? Do they really expect us to believe buyers will somehow fix these problems for free?