NEW YORK — On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced a list of federal properties it intends to close or sell, including the FBI headquarters and the main Department of Justice building, classifying them as “not core to government operations.”
However, hours later, a revised list was issued with only 320 entries, excluding any in Washington, D.C. The TIME, the original source of the list, has not yet commented on the reason for the change and the removal of numerous properties.
The initial list encompassed some of the nation’s most iconic buildings, along with courthouses, offices, and even parking garages, spanning nearly every state. In Washington, D.C., it featured the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI headquarters), the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, the Old Post Office building (formerly a Trump hotel), and the American Red Cross headquarters. Headquarters of agencies like the Department of Labor and the Department of Housing and Urban Development were also included.
Outside of D.C., the administration targeted the Major General Emmett J. Bean Federal Center in Indiana, the Sam Nunn Atlanta Federal Center, the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco, and the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York. Approximately 80% of the 2.4 million federal workers are located outside of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
According to the GSA, the list of 443 properties identifies “buildings and facilities that are not core to government operations, or non-core properties for disposal.” Selling these properties “ensures that taxpayer dollars are no longer spent on vacant or underutilized federal space,” and “helps eliminate costly maintenance and allows us to reinvest in high-quality work environments that support agency missions.”
These designations are part of an effort by Trump and Elon Musk to reduce the size of the federal workforce and decrease government spending. They claim that selling the designated buildings could save the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars and significantly alter the operations of major Cabinet agencies funded by Congress. The Trump administration has also mandated that federal workers return to in-person work every day.
Several buildings on the initial list house agencies that Trump has frequently criticized, such as the FBI and Justice Department. The FBI and HUD headquarters also represent the brutalist architectural style that Trump has sought to eliminate.
Reducing federal office space has been a key objective of the new administration. Last month, GSA regional managers were instructed by the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on approximately 7,500 federal offices nationwide.
In a subsequent meeting, GSA regional managers were informed that their goal was to terminate up to 300 leases per day, according to an employee who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has published numerous canceled office leases on its website, raising concerns nationwide about the future of services previously provided from those offices.
The list released on Tuesday included a large federal building and courthouse in Los Angeles, a federal building in Oklahoma City that replaced the one destroyed in the 1995 bombing, an IRS computing center in West Virginia, and IRS service centers in Ogden, Utah; Memphis, Tennessee; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Andover, Massachusetts; and Holtsville, New York.
The administration is also planning to sell federal buildings named after civil rights figures like Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta and Rosa Parks in Detroit, as well as the Montgomery, Alabama bus station that played a crucial role in the civil rights movement and now houses the Freedom Rides Museum.
According to TIME, the GSA’s Public Buildings Service stated that the majority of properties classified as unnecessary are office spaces.
“Decades of insufficient funding have rendered many of these buildings functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal workforce,”
They stated that the GSA will consider the future of these buildings “in an orderly fashion to ensure taxpayers no longer pay for empty and underutilized federal office space, or the significant maintenance costs associated with long-term building ownership—potentially saving more than $430 million in annual operating costs.”
The 443 buildings, currently owned and maintained by the GSA, encompass nearly 80 million rentable square feet, according to the agency.
