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The federal government appeared to be announcing a fire sale of publicly owned buildings, many of them integral to the urban fabric of cities across America, including the symbolic design of the nation's capital.
Last Tuesday, the General Services Administration, popularly known as the government's landlord, listed 443 buildings as "non-core" properties, meaning they could be sold. The slapdash list, which was quickly amended, then withdrawn, included assets that would be difficult to sell or repurpose, the headquarters for entire agencies, and key parts of Federal Triangle, the neoclassical core of downtown Washington that took decades to design and construct.
If these properties were simply dumped on the market in a rapid effort to downsize the federal government, the cost to taxpayers would be enormous, including the cost of rehousing what remains of the federal government and the likely sale of properties at below their real value. But there would also be a potentially catastrophic impact on the nation's architectural legacy and its public art, commissioned over decades by the GSA. Decades of largely bipartisan agreement about the role and purpose of federal architecture - to serve the public and symbolize that service visually - could be shredded. The very idea of the public realm would be at stake.
A new version of the original list, which included the art-deco-influenced Robert F. Kennedy Main Justice Department Building and the elegantly spare "Apex" building that houses the Federal Trade Commission, could be issued at any moment. Disposing of government assets is nothing new for the GSA, which also helps other agencies off-load properties that are underutilized, wasteful or unnecessary. But that process usually takes years and sometimes more than a decade, and is governed by strict rules designed to ensure that public assets either continue to serve a public need or are sold in a manner that gives the public the best return on its initial investment.
When Elliot Doomes, the former public buildings commissioner at the GSA during the Biden administration, saw the initial list, he wasn't surprised it included underutilized buildings such as the headquarters for the Departments of Energy and Labor. But there were properties, such as the recently opened John A. Volpe Center (which serves the Department of Transportation) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that made no sense. The GSA brought that $750 million building online just two years ago in a land swap deal that saw the property redeveloped "at virtually no cost to the federal government."
The GSA's initial proposal is broad and indiscriminate in its listing of disposable property. If allowed to mostly stand, it could spark bipartisan pushback as the implications of its size and scope are better understood.
"There has been a bipartisan consensus for well over a decade that federal real property management needs to be improved," Doomes said in an email to The Washington Post on Thursday. "Correspondingly, there has also been a bipartisan notion that if the public acquires a piece of real estate that it should receive full market value of that real estate when it is sold."
Consolidating government office space is logistically complex and costly - workers must be moved, buildings renovated, interior space built out for new purposes - and divesting buildings or terminating leases can impact local real estate markets as well as the quality of life and urban fabric around the privatized or vacated properties. Many government buildings are designed for specific functions, making them difficult to repurpose. Federal courthouses, for example, often feature complex, tripartite circulation patterns, allowing the general public, judges and court personnel, and criminals to move in independent corridors. Even so, since 2015, according to a GSA statement from December, more than 1,000 federal properties have been divested, at a savings of some $2 billion.
The list revealed on Tuesday, which included federal properties across the country, was shocking not just because it took department heads by surprise and was issued as the government is demanding that workers return to buildings potentially destined for sale, but also because it contradicts the administration's own agenda for government architecture. (A GSA spokesperson was unable to comment before publication time.)
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Among the first executive actions taken by President Donald Trump was an inauguration-day memorandum called "Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture," which required the GSA to "advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government."
Many of the buildings on the proposed list don't just meet that requirement, but also are key elements of the 1902 McMillan Plan, which created the Washington we know today. The 1908 Jamie L. Whitten Federal Building, which houses the Department of Agriculture, was the first building on the south side of the National Mall to be realized under the McMillan Plan. The home of the Federal Trade Commission, known as the Apex building, sits at the eastern point of Federal Triangle, opposite the National Gallery of Art, facing one of the city's finest pieces of public sculpture, the Andrew W. Mellon Fountain. It is an essential visual element of the most majestic stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, the traditional path of inaugural parades. The American National Red Cross Building, with its pediment of Corinthian columns, sits opposite the Ellipse that frames views of the south portico of the White House.
Justin Shubow, who served as chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts during the first Trump administration, says some of those buildings could continue to play a role in public life.
"A building like the Agriculture Department, were it to be disposed of by the federal government, would be ideal for a public purpose such as a new museum," Shubow said Thursday by telephone. "I don't think anyone wants us to start tearing down beautiful, beloved buildings."
And yet, all of these spaces could be sold and serve any number of private purposes. Ordinarily, a complex set of rules governing things such as signage, exterior lighting, historic preservation and impacts on traffic would limit the disruption to the carefully designed and maintained monumental core of Washington. But rules only matter if they are enforced. The GSA under the second Trump administration appears to be prioritizing speed and immediate gains over deliberation and long-term financial strategy. It is not ridiculous to think that the center of Washington could look more like Las Vegas or Dubai than the fin-de-siecle City Beautiful design that took almost a century to realize.
The impact of a massive sell-off of government buildings isn't limited to just Washington, or to the urban design of the nation's capital. Millions of square feet in Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Atlanta and many smaller cities also could be dumped on the market, causing chaos. And many of the GSA buildings include art commissioned by the GSA or the agencies that originally built the structures before the GSA was created in 1949.
This includes Tiffany windows built into the Red Cross building, paintings and murals commissioned during the Roosevelt administration as part of the Works Progress Administration, and modern and contemporary art, including an abstract Tony Smith sculpture installed at the Frances Perkins Building, which houses the Department of Labor.
There are rules governing this, too - again, rules that only matter if followed. And many key works of art, including friezes, murals and sculpture incorporated into facades, can't simply be removed from buildings or would make no sense if the building was privatized. (The GSA's Fine Arts Program referred a request for comment to a public affairs officer, who wasn't able to supply one.)
One of those works, integral to the Federal Trade Commission building, symbolizes the larger possible damage to the public realm if a significant portion of this list is actually sold. Michael Lantz's sculpture, "Man Controlling Trade," uses two riderless horses, ferociously restrained by muscular male figures, to symbolize the need within a free-market economy for protection from the rapacious forces of monopoly and unchecked greed.
What would happen to them, and what would they mean, if the building was sold to a hedge fund and then leased back to the government at exorbitant rates?
It is possible that cooler heads, with some architectural wisdom, will prevail. The list released Tuesday may represent buildings for possible sale, not an actual inventory of space definitely slated for disposition. And outrage over the possible targeting of historic buildings integral to the design of Washington could save them. But the damage to the idea of public space and government isn't limited to these buildings, or any one architectural style.
It is virtually impossible that America can recoup its investment in these properties if they are sold off rapidly and at this scale. Such a sale probably would turn the government into a renter rather than an owner, with rental rates set by anyone rich enough to buy the properties. The potential for corruption is unprecedented.
Or, almost unprecedented. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian economic assets were privatized in a chaotic and deeply corrupt process that led directly to oligarchy, crony capitalism, vast inequality, civil unrest and the authoritarian system that prevails today.
No one questions that the GSA needs to unload a substantial part of its real estate holdings. Robin Carnahan, then the GSA administrator, said in January that the government could reduce its footprint by some 30 percent. A well-planned, deliberative process to reduce the government's real estate holdings is essential to the GSA's mission. And some of the buildings on last Tuesday's list, including the Forrestal Building near the Smithsonian Castle, should definitely be demolished and the land repurposed.
But if this does turn out to be a massive, rapid privatization of federal assets similar to the chaotic purge of federal workers by Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service, the public will lose not just money, but probably faith in government itself as well. In Washington, especially, federal architecture tells a symbolic story of public access to the government, transparency, the growth of institutions and whole sectors of the economy. Buildings represent service, no matter how imperfectly that service is rendered. If this goes forward, they will represent merely assets, sold at a loss, to people whose interest is entirely economic.
It will be hard to look at those structures without bitterness and resentment.