The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it could sell hundreds of federal properties around the country, including offices for the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
Officials at the General Services Administration, an agency that manages the federal government’s real estate portfolio, originally said they had identified more than 440 properties that they could “dispose of” in an effort to ensure that “taxpayers no longer pay for empty and underutilized federal office space.”
By Tuesday evening, however, the list of buildings deemed “not core to government operations” had been trimmed to 320 properties, removing a number of high-profile buildings, many of them in Washington, D.C.
Still, the effort amounted to an aggressive attempt by the Trump administration to offload a vast amount of federal property, and it immediately raised questions about how the move could affect government services across the country and federal workers who have been ordered to return to the office. It also advanced a major priority for Elon Musk’s government overhaul operation, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which has fixated on eliminating “underutilized” federal office space.
The original list had included the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice building and the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the F.B.I. headquarters.
The administration had also identified the headquarters for the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Energy Department, the Labor Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and even the General Services Administration. Large office buildings used by the Agriculture Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were included.
The revised list no longer includes those buildings. A spokeswoman for the agency did not provide animmediate comment on the changes.
The revised list of buildings to potentially sell includes a number of federal office buildings with more than one million square feet each.
The properties are not currently on the market, but the ledger reflects the administration’s intent to sell off government-owned real estate. The General Services Administration will consider and evaluate all serious offers, according to an agency spokeswoman.
The effect could be felt in regions across the country. Buildings used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were identified as disposable. Social Security Administration offices across the country were also marked for potential sale — including a 534,000-square-foot regional office in Philadelphia and field offices in New Hampshire, western Pennsylvania, and Saginaw, Mich.
In New York City, the properties included not only the offices used by the U.S. delegation to the U.N., which overlooks the U.N., but also two downtown buildings that house offices for federal prosecutors with the Southern District of New York and the I.R.S.
Federal office towers in Chicago and Boston were included on the sales ledger; U.S. senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, both Democrats, have offices in those buildings. The Chicago building includes more than a million square feet and outposts of the I.R.S. and Drug Enforcement Administration. The Boston tower is more than 800,000 square feet and houses offices of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Labor Department and others.
“This plan raises serious concerns,” Ms. Warren said in a statement. “As Donald Trump and Elon Musk dismantle our government, piece by piece, and sell it for parts, it’s the seniors relying on Social Security, the veterans looking for health care, and entrepreneurs applying for small business loans that are paying the price.”
Federal buildings that were about a million square feet were also slated for possible sale in Los Angeles, Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland, Memphis and Kansas City, Mo. Some included federal and immigration courtrooms.
It remains unclear how much federal property could be sold and how quickly the buildings could be offloaded. Denise Maes, a regional administrator for the General Services Administration under the Biden administration, said the list represented an “enormous portfolio,” and she worried that selling the buildings could be extremely disruptive for agencies and their workers.
“I don’t know how much thought is going into this,” Ms. Maes said. “It’s just a wrecking ball in getting rid of things.”
Ms. Maes said it did not seem rational for the administration to try to sell off many office buildings while also calling federal workers back to the office. She said she was also concerned about the impact on the commercial real estate market if the government pushes up supply and tries to sells buildings at less than market price.
The list also included a handful of child care centers, including in a federal courthouse on Long Island, N.Y., and a 17,849-square-foot facility for employees of a sprawling federal office complex in Battle Creek, Mich. The entire complex, whose tenants include the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Logistics Agency, is also marked for possible sale.
On Tuesday, officials at the General Services Administration said they had also identified properties that were necessary to retain, including courthouses, land ports of entry and other buildings that were critical for national defense and law enforcement. But the agency, which owns and leases over 360 million square feet of space in more than 8,000 buildings, said that selling the “non-core” properties could result in savings of more than $430 million in annual operating costs.
“Decades of funding deficiencies have resulted in many of these buildings becoming functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal work force,” the agency said in a statement. “We can no longer hope that funding will emerge to resolve these longstanding issues.”
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