GSA prepares to sell over 400 federal properties | Hacker News Reader

GSA prepares to sell over 400 federal properties

politico.com

102 pointsthrowaway575249 comments

I assume this is to let private corporations hold the government hostage in perpetuity and charge arbitrary amounts of money? Because the government would have no leverage in negotiating a lower rent? And if this prevents it from functioning, then even better?

commercial real estate still recovering from post covid / work from home situation

so federal government has plenty of negotiating power

also with layoffs the space requirements may have changed and such large buildings may be excessive

> commercial real estate still recovering from post covid / work from home situation

> so federal government has plenty of negotiating power

You have this backward. The government is trying to sell. If real estate is still recovering (aka down) then they don't have much negotiating power.

Buyer's market.

OPs point is funnily accurate if you’d like to consider a certain ‘real-estate’ person in government could stand to benefit from the buildings being sold at the lowest price (recovering market) and that same person people will likely be friends with the buyers (lots of negotiating power).

They never mentioned whether it’d actually be beneficial for the government.

Can’t wait for all of our federal agency buildings to be named after different members of the Trump family once they’ve changed hands! /s

Ummmm, that's the taxpayers' money.

I mean negotiating power to acquire/lease new space as they'll likely relocating/downsizing :)

keeping a lot of buildings cost a lot of money so even if they're sold at lower than expected prices saves money long term

Why would they be able to charge arbitrary amounts of money? The Federal Government owns 37 million square feet of office space in the DC area. Out of 370 million square feet of total office space in the region.

According to the article:

> A White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions said that the structures GSA plans to offload “all have building repairs that would be cheaper to sell than fix.”

I don't know if you're familiar with the commercial real estate market in D.C., but the market has tanked completely. 50-year old buildings (like the Hoover building) are basically worthless and are being torn down.

And yet there's a Return To Office mandate, and now selling off offices. You're trying to rationalize selling off

Anyone planning on this might want to consider that particularly after a Supreme Court decision a decade or so ago, the feds can exercise eminent domain for almost trivial reasons.

They also might want to consider that the sales could potentially be later determined to have been part of an illegal liquidation of a government agency - or even treason - and find themselves with nothing.

> They also might want to consider that the sales could potentially be later determined to have been part of an illegal liquidation of a government agency - or even treason - and find themselves with nothing.

You really think that’s going to happen with the current SCOTUS majority? Even if a lower court ruled that way, you think the Roberts court is going to uphold it? And absent radical schemes like “court packing”, conservatives have got SCOTUS locked up for years, even decades, to come

Pennies on the dollar. No conflict of interest on the part of the buyers.

Unbelievable that they'll be selling the federal buildings in downtown Chicago in this property market. Very short-sighted to give up those prime locations in a fire sale.

Some federal buildings considered for sale have a utilization rate of like 25%.

How long should the government keep paying for the upkeep while badly using it?

Do you think the rent will be lower than whatever it's paying for upkeep? Why?

I don't think the parent is saying that. I think the idea is that if you have two buildings with utilization of less than 50%, you move people in one single building and sell the other one.

50% utilization is good for preventing covid spread tho just saying

Given the raw # of government employees hasn't grown in ~40 years, plus we have the lowest # of government employees per capita...

Depends how much the upkeep is and how much rent they expect to pay for buildings that will be leased back to them at profit-making rates.

Are we also assuming the government will not need that space in the future? What happens then?

Paying someone to make a profit on property at the government's expense is not efficient.

Every action should be assumed to be as short-sighted as the American President’s attention span.

The people who articulated a more complex and nuanced strategy didn’t get any traction. We’re left with those who want chaos, power grabs, and fantasies of a hemispheric empire.

> The people who articulated a more complex and nuanced strategy

Damn we had those? Where?

Transferring public assets to private hands is very profitable to the buyers. That's how Putin became a trillionaire.

This is not "a shift in how the government manages its real estate." This is looting.

Actually, it's not a shift because the HSA has been offloading underutilized government buildings for 30+ years.

The post-Soviet / early Russia oligarch playbook.

The US really is losing the Cold War. It just lost async.

Edit: it's also to destroy the institutions by making it harder to rehire and house people after the firings are done, as pointed out by someone else here.

> After an earlier version of this story published, the “non-core” properties was updated to exclude all Washington buildings and dozens in Maryland in Virginia that were previously included. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about why the changes were made.

The initial list included a bunch of HQ buildings that made no sense to sell. For example the Department of Justice is always going to need a headquarters and it should always be within the District of Columbia to exclude state interference.

And it's not like tons of DC commercial real estate companies are flush with capital to buy old federal buildings downtown right now.

> GSA may not sell all of the offices. The agency said in its statement that it “welcomes creative solutions, including sale-lease backs, ground leases and other forms of public/private partnerships to drive the full optimization of our space.”

Selling the property only to rent it back, eh? The properties under consideration for sale include agency headquarters (HHS, GSA, DOL, DOJ, FBI), and not to mention scientific facilities (FDA), and unless Musk and Trump intend to fully close those departments or to make these departments remote-first...

Back towards the end of his first term, Trump started moving a lot of agencies out of DC. I think BLM was headed to Colorado etc. IIRC there was also talk of moving FDA back then.

This type of arrangement isn't novel. Property is high and the space is underutilized. Sell high, lease the fraction that you need, and have the option to buy back at the end of the contract (often with the right of first refusal.)

On your second point: it does look like there are going to be significantly fewer federal employees, so unless there are also going to be big relocation programs, most of these places are going to continue to be under capacity. It's not in anyone's interest to have these places locked up, especially in urban cores.

edit: as usual, I'm curious what my error is here. Please explain. Thanks.

GSA has been planning to sell office space since last year: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/facilities-construction/2024/.... It’s office space in DC is significantly underutilized.

Different list.

The current administration has added far more properties to the list, including major headquarters buildings.

It doesn't make sense to sell the HQs and make everyone RTO at the same time.

When you're also firing everyone who would have returned to those offices...

It is a perfect plan when you are trying institutionally destroy oversight mechanisms. Fire the people and sell the buildings they worked in. Create maximal damage and work to restore oversight. It's actually quite brilliant, even though it is evil.

From your link:

> The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy blueprint crafted by former Trump administration officials, states that “COVID made telework ubiquitous, but the law and regulations are still stuck in an era when telework was unique.”

And yet we have stories like "Federal workers ordered to return to offices without desks, Wi-Fi and lights":

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43253562

So at the same time we have the administration saying "RTO" and the admin's playbook people saying (in the past?) "we have RTO, why do we need space?".

"The General Services Administration announced Tuesday that it will begin selling off some of the federal government’s most recognizable office buildings, including the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which serves as the FBI headquarters in Washington, and the Robert F. Kennedy Building, home to the Department of Justice — a landmark shift in how the government manages its real estate portfolio."

Selling the FBI and DOJ Headquarters. You can view the list yourself, https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-pr...

If you are in Seattle, the main federal building is listed. This contains the IRS and the offices of the representatives.

https://archive.is/PpMp0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson_Federal_Build...

The government is for sale - private equity style perpetual plunder.

The FBI HQ had a lot of interesting accomodations due to the secure nature of the work there. Who could take it over and use those features? A defense contractor I guess?

That building specifically has been targeted as a tear-down for a long time. It's truly a shitty building and the FBI has been trying to relocate for years. If they succeed in selling it, it will get knocked down.

Great, making sure that the US government will be on the hook for exorbitant rents, even long after Trump is gone. The party of "government can't do anything right, because I'll make it so" strikes again.

I looked up one of the ones in Dallas and have been inside it. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy the Dallas buildings, they should just be demolished.

>“We can no longer assume that funding will materialize to fix these longstanding issues.”

This is blatantly disingenuous. An administration that is doing pretty much as it pleases with hardly a check, with friendly majorities in both houses of Congress, claiming powerlessness? Please. And how is selling these facilities going to solve the problem? Do they really expect us to believe buyers will somehow fix these problems for free?

Part of the corporate restructuring of the federal government under the chapter 11 bankruptcy.

28 U.S. Code § 3002 (15)(A)

If we can’t restore the constitutional apportionment of power between the federal and state governments—and it seems like that ship has sailed—the next best thing would be to decentralize the federal government and get as much of it out of DC as possible: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/moving-fede...

Rayiner, this has nothing to do with that.

If we are decentralizing operations, it would make sense to reduce GSA's office-space footprint in D.C., no?

Then wtf are they listing the main federal building in Seattle and for many agencies in the NW. Please stop spraying your same opinion all over this discussion.

It's almost as if they're being willfully obtuse and acting in bad faith.

Perhaps we could decentralize most offices and drop the cost of maintaining their buildings entirely. Maybe people could live where they work, work from home if you will.

No, they should come into work but the office should be in places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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