The General Services Administration (GSA) on Tuesday published a list of more than 400 federal buildings and properties to sell, including the FBI headquarters, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice and other important federal facilities. Hours later, 123 buildings, including high-profile locations such as the J. Edgar Hoover Building and Veterans Administration buildings in Washington, DC, were removed from the list. By Wednesday, the entire list of the GSA website had disappeared.
Wired created a map and a searchable table of the government property for sale and briefly listed, which also includes corresponding political representatives for each location.
Wired cross-referral two data sets to create the map: the list of ‘non-nuclear’ features originally published-and then removed-through the GSA, and the inventory of possession and rented properties (IOLP). The GSA defines non-nuclear properties as buildings and facilities that are “not at the core of the government’s operations”, and in a press release on the list, sales argued that sales “would provide savings to the US taxpayer”. The IOLP, a publicly accessible database, provides detailed information on GSA possession and rented properties across the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam and US Samoa.
Of those originally indicated as for sale, historically significant properties such as the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of Chicago, John C. Kluczynski Federal Building and the Custom House, an Art Deco building that records a city block in the old city of Philadelphia. Less prominent, but still significant buildings, include the Martinsburg Computing Center in Kearneysville, West Virginia, which houses the IRS as the ‘Individual and Corporate Tax Administration Master File’, and the central heating plant in Washington, DC, which offers heated and cooled water. (The GSA has since claimed that not all buildings are for sale, but the agency has repeatedly turned its tune into different internal documents and communications to staff members.)
The GSA, an independent government agency, runs the government and a significant part of the federal real estate portfolio. Over the past few weeks, the agency has been taken down by forced resignations and reductions in powers, including the elimination of 18F, a GSA unit focused on the effectiveness of the government. The GSA’s Public Buildings Service (PBS) is reportedly planning to cut 63 percent of its workforce, about 3600 people in total. Elon Musk’s collaborators are manned throughout the GSA, including the Director of Technology Transformation Services, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, and X staff member Nicole Hollander. A number of young Doge technologists also have access to the agency.
Wired reported in February that employees were told at the GSA to sell more than 500 federal buildings, including properties that house government agencies and the offices of US senators. The list of these buildings divided the properties into ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ assets and designated the ‘non-core’ assets to be sold.
In a note on the original list, it is said that the agency’s intention is to reduce the “size of the property footprint of the property by 50 percent and the number of buildings by 70 percent. Reductions will be focused on the non-core general office space of the portfolio that can be replaced as needed in the private rented market. If you move forward, all non-nuclear buildings will be disposed of and their tenants will be switched to leases. “