The Trump administration has reversed its decision to list nearly 80 million square feet of federal property for possible sale, another setback for President Donald Trump’s efforts to significantly shrink the size of the federal government.
The about-face capped a stunning 18 hours that shook federal agencies and threatened already-wobbly commercial real estate markets. At 2 p.m. Tuesday, the General Services Administration posted a list of 443 properties it was considering for sale — an inventory that ranged from an El Paso toll booth to the Food and Drug Administration’s research campus in Silver Spring, Maryland.
In the next five hours, more than 100 properties were removed from the catalog, including the agency headquarters of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Justice, Labor and Veterans Affairs. By Wednesday morning, the entire list had been removed with a message that said, “Non-core property list (Coming soon).”
A GSA spokesman declined to explain the abrupt reversal, the latest challenge to Trump’s swift efforts to downsize a federal bureaucracy that he’s referred to as a “swamp.” After a frenetic six weeks of executive action, the president, his billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency have had to undo spending freezes, rehire government employees and walk back management directives.
Today, Musk is expected to meet with Republican congressional representatives. GOP lawmakers have been curtailing their public meetings with their constituents given voters’ anger and frustration with the cuts.
After Musk’s plans to sell federally owned buildings became known, Crain’s identified four New York properties as potential sale candidates.
For Sale
The list posted Tuesday was provocative in its breadth. It contained properties in 47 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, impacting Republican and Democratic congressional districts alike. Many of the properties were on the National Register of Historic Places. And some were wrapped up in political and historical legacies, including buildings named for presidents, civil rights leaders — and even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
And many of the federal buildings were hubs for taxpayer services in cities across the country, handling small business loans, Social Security benefits and health and safety enforcement.
On Tuesday, GSA said it would manage the sale of properties to ensure taxpayers got the best deal and that it wouldn’t disrupt already fragile commercial real estate markets. That’s especially true of Washington, where agency headquarters give the federal government an outsized influence on the market — which is already seeing stubbornly high vacancy rates.
The sale of some of the properties could have created unique problems. The inventory of properties for disposal included a specialized satellite facility for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in Suitland, Maryland, the 3.1 million-square-foot FDA research lab, and a northern Virginia campus that doesn’t appear in federal property records but has long been associated with the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Trump administration has also been pushing for federal workers to return to the office after years of liberal work-from-home rules that predated the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.
“We have hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have not been showing up to work,” Trump said in an address to Congress Tuesday. “We are draining the swamp. It’s very simple. And the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over.”
Latest Hurdles
Musk’s efforts to curtail the government — through a White House office he’s dubbed DOGE — have faced new practical and legal hurdles in just the last 24 hours.
On Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management walked back a directive telling federal agencies to cut probationary employees, after a federal court in California ordered a pause on the dismissals last week.
And also Wednesday, the US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to pay as much as $2 billion to contractors for the US Agency for International Development.
