Trump administration seeks to reduce federal real estate footprint
The list of underutilized federal buildings that the administration of President Donald Trump wants to offload continues to change — a huge office building near L’Enfant Plaza at 7th and D Streets in Southwest D.C. is the latest addition.
At 845,169 square feet, the Federal Office Building, located on Southwest D.C.’s 301 Seventh Street, is the largest property so far on the U.S. General Services Administration list of “Assets identified for accelerated disposition,” on its website.
Last month, the GSA published, then deleted, a list of 443 buildings and properties it had identified to potentially offload from the government’s real estate portfolio.
Now, the GSA is slowly adding properties from across the country back to its officially-published list of properties it intends to sell — as of Friday morning, 23 assets were on the list. An office property at 4700 River Road, in Riverdale, Maryland, was added earlier.
According to the Washington Business Journal, the initially published list on March 4 included several federal buildings and properties outside of downtown D.C., which could eventually be disposed of.
Among the assets outside of downtown Washington are buildings in Suitland, Maryland, that house the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as the Department of Energy’s main building in Germantown.
Also on the initial list were several properties in a Springfield, Virginia, GSA warehouse campus, near the Franconia-Springfield Metro Station, as well as U.S. State Department field offices in Arlington, and a federal building in Reston that houses the headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey.
In its Frequently Asked Questions section, the GSA explained why the initial list is no longer public on its website:
“In order to achieve our goal, 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, based on several criteria such as deferred maintenance and operating cost, utilization, and the general availability of replacement space in the local market.”
This past Tuesday, a congressional hearing looked at the shrinking federal footprint.
David Marroni, who leads the physical infrastructure team for the Government Accountability Office, testified that changes involving federal real estate have ramped up in the months since Trump took office.
“This has disrupted the long-standing inertia that has slowed previous efforts to reshape the federal government’s real property holdings,” he said.
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