The Trump administration said on Thursday that it would try to sell and relocate the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of a larger effort to downsize the federal government’s real estate portfolio.
The Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in Washington has been added to a list of properties that the administration says it is trying to offload in order to eliminate waste. The building faces more than $500 million in deferred maintenance and modernization needs, and costs more than $56 million in annual rent and operations expenses, federal officials said in a statement.
The timing of the move and the new location were still being considered, officials said. They added that staying in the Washington region was a “top priority.”
Scott Turner, the housing secretary, has said that the headquarters are “in disrepair,” and that he wants to create an environment “where our people want to come work.”
The agency’s focus, he said in a statement Thursday, was on “a workplace that reflects the values of efficiency, accountability and purpose.”
Federal officials also said that the number of housing department staff members assigned to work in the headquarters amounted to only around half of the building’s capacity. The department has been considering additional cuts to its work force as part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy.
Roughly 2,300 employees had already opted to take a “deferred resignation” offer and leave their jobs as of last week, though all of those departures have not been finalized.
The Trump administration signaled its intent to sell the building last month, when the General Services Administration, an agency that manages the federal real estate portfolio, released a list of more than 440 properties that it could “dispose of” to more efficiently use federal office space. The list included several high-profile buildings, such as the housing department headquarters and those of the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the Health and Human Services Department.
But in the hours after that list was published, around 100 properties, including many in the Washington area, were removed. The next day, the entire inventory was taken down, after it was criticized by Democratic lawmakers and others who worried about the potential effect on government services.
In late March, the General Services Administration again listed properties for potential sale. The list now identifies about two dozen of them across the country.
Officials said that the list was much shorter than the original version because they were “refining” the process. “In alignment with the president’s direction, and to drive maximum value for the federal real estate footprint, we decided to use a more incremental approach focusing on a shorter list of assets that have already been evaluated,” the agency said on its website.
Federal officials have said that they would try to sell the properties as quickly as possible while complying with legislative and regulatory requirements. They have also said that interested buyers would be “invited to attend open houses, tours, inspections and other public events.”
The Trump administration has also sent out hundreds of lease termination notices for federal office spaces across the country, an effort that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency identified as an early focus of its cost-cutting initiative. But many of those termination notices have been rescinded in recent weeks as lawmakers and some agency officials have pushed back.
Madeleine Ngo covers U.S. economic policy and how it affects people across the country.
The post Trump Administration Aims to Sell Housing Department Headquarters appeared first on New York Times.
