On Tuesday, the General Services Administration (GSA) published a list of more than 400 federal buildings and properties to be sold, including the FBI headquarters, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice, and other key federal facilities. Hours later, 123 buildings, including high-profile sites like the J. Edgar Hoover Building and Veterans Administration buildings in Washington, DC, were removed from the list. By Wednesday, the entire list had disappeared from the GSA website.
WIRED has created a map and a searchable table of the government properties that were for sale and briefly listed, which also includes corresponding political representatives for each location.
WIRED cross-referenced two datasets to create the map: the list of “non-core” properties originally published—and then removed—by the GSA, and the Inventory of Owned and Leased Properties (IOLP). The GSA defines non-core properties as buildings and facilities that are “not core to government operations,” and in a press release about the list, argued that sales would provide “savings to the American taxpayer.” The IOLP, a publicly accessible database, offers detailed information on GSA-owned and leased properties across the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa.
Among those originally denoted as for sale are historically significant properties like Chicago’s Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed John C. Kluczynski Federal Building, and the Custom House, an Art Deco building taking up a city block in Philadelphia’s Old City. Less prominent but still notable buildings include the Martinsburg Computing Center in Kearneysville, West Virginia, which houses what the IRS describes as its “individual and corporate tax administration master file data base,” and the Central Heating Plant in Washington, DC, which provides heated and chilled water to government buildings, museums, and national monuments. (The GSA has since claimed that not all buildings are for sale, but the agency has repeatedly changed its tune throughout different internal documents and communications to staffers.)
The GSA, an independent government agency, manages government IT and a significant portion of the federal real estate portfolio. In recent weeks, the agency has been decimated by forced resignations and reductions in forces, including the elimination of 18F, a GSA unit focused on government efficiency. GSA’s Public Buildings Service (PBS) is reportedly planning to cut 63 percent of its workforce, about 3600 people in total. Elon Musk’s associates are staffed throughout GSA, including Technology Transformation Services director Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, and X staffer Nicole Hollander. A number of young DOGE technologists also have access to the agency.
WIRED previously reported in February that employees at the GSA were told to sell off 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 as to be sold.
A note on the original list states that the agency’s intention is eventually to reduce the “size of the owned real estate footprint 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 which can be replaced as needed in the private leased market. Moving forward, all non-core buildings will be disposed of and their tenants will be transitioned into leases.”
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