Trump administration makes hundreds of federal properties available for sale

The Trump administration on Tuesday announced that hundreds of federally owned properties are available for sale, including the headquarters of the Justice Department, Labor Department and U.S. Census Bureau – an effort that, if carried out, could radically shrink the federal real estate portfolio and have a major impact on the D.C. area.

The General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, released a list of 443 office properties deemed “not core to government operations,” as part of its effort to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. The announcement, made hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to address a joint session of Congress, says the spaces are “vacant or underutilized.”

On Tuesday evening, however, 123 rows disappeared, leaving out all of the D.C. properties and most of those in Virginia and Maryland. It was unclear what happened, and a spokesperson with the GSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some of the properties had previously been marked for sale, but others on the list represent the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to fundamentally shift the manner in which the federal government operates. And, while the plan is national in scope, the capital region would be most affected should it go forward. Nearly one-third of the buildings slated for closure are in the District or its Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

In the initial version of its list, the administration targeted 41 locations for disposal in the District, representing about 17 million square feet of federal property. That list included some of the government’s largest and best-known buildings. The Justice Department’s Pennsylvania Avenue NW headquarters, also known as the Robert F. Kennedy Building; the Social Security Administration’s Wilbur J. Cohen Building on Independence Avenue SW; and the Agriculture Department’s South Building just off the National Mall have all been listed as available for sale. So has the U.S. Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland, Maryland, alongside 82 other buildings and 11.4 million square feet in the state.

Other federal properties in the District identified as “noncore” by the General Service Administration include the Labor Department headquarters on Constitution Avenue NW, the American Red Cross building on 17th Street NW and the National Museum of American Diplomacy located inside the State Department. The GSA, which included its own D.C. headquarters on the list, owns 47 million square feet of property in the D.C. region.

The Pentagon and some other major federal properties in the D.C. area did not appear to be affected. But outside the region, the Oklahoma City federal building that replaced the one destroyed in a 1995 domestic terrorist attack was on the list, as was the federal building in Detroit that Congress recently named after Rosa Parks.

A GSA spokesperson described Tuesday’s announcement as part of its effort to save money.

“Noncore assets cost over $430M annually to operate and maintain, represent over $8.3 billion in recapitalization needs and often do not provide federal employees the high quality work environments they need to fulfill their missions,” the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the list of noncore assets is still subject to change.

The scale of the effort stunned regional officials and real estate experts, even amid the publicized push by the Trump administration and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service to shed federal property and reduce some agencies’ staff by as much as 90 percent. The announcement came on the heels of widespread terminations of federal office leases, which have caused confusion after workers were ordered back to the office, only to learn that many of their offices are slated for closure.

A former senior GSA official questioned whether the administration could succeed in disposing of this many properties, especially after terminating so many of the workers who would be responsible for carrying out the process.

“A lot of these core assets are fully occupied and relatively new,” said the former official, who requested anonymity because he still works in the real estate sector and fears reprisal from the administration. “Even if you wanted to sell the building, with all the people GSA has gotten rid of, I don’t think they have the manpower to sell all these buildings, let alone the money it’d take to move all the feds out of those buildings.”

The former official noted that many of the buildings are subject to historic preservation protections, and that disposing of them requires compliance with environmental impact rules, all of which take time. He called certain properties on the list “nonsensical,” including a federal courthouse in Los Angeles that was built less than a decade ago.

“If you got rid of that asset, where are you going to hold federal court?” he asked. “Are you going to go out and lease buildings? I don’t know what the strategy is.”

A spokesperson for the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) did not immediately return a request for comment.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia), whose suburban district includes many government workers, said in reaction to the initial version of the list that it makes sense to look at the federal footprint and whether some buildings are no longer necessary. “But the problem we have here is the DOGE approach is completely thoughtless and mindless,” he said, where “the utility of either a unit in a federal agency or property is underestimated or ignored at great expense to the American people.”

The changes would also be destabilizing for the D.C. Metro, which was built in large part to ferry people who work in and with the federal government. A third of stations have federal property on top of them.

“Metro’s largest customer every day is the federal government, and it’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” Connolly said. “If you jeopardize those patterns of work and commute, you could upend the entire Metro system that we started over 50 years ago.”

Some District officials have expressed eagerness for the federal government to turn over underutilized buildings, which could be transformed into more varied uses and bring in property taxes. In the Southwest quadrant, they see a particular opportunity to build a neighborhood connecting the National Mall and the Wharf district where hulking federal offices now stand.

“It could be good news for the city if the properties that are currently tax-exempt become privately owned and get added back to the tax rolls,” said Steve Teitelbaum, adjunct professor of real estate at American University, referring to the fact that the federal government doesn’t pay property taxes to the District.

But he noted that the plan will work only if the government can find buyers for the buildings in a challenging environment for commercial real estate. “The problem is, if you dump it all on the market at the same time when the market is already depressed, what are you going to get for it?” he said.