Trump and Musk Rescind List of Federal Properties for Sale

If your head is spinning, you are not alone. Trump issues an executive order, one court overturns it, another restores, another court overturns it. Musk sends a mass email to hundreds of thousands of civil servants, telling them they must respond with a list of five things they did in the past week; their failure to respond will be treated as a resignation. The heads of some agencies tell their employees to ignore Elon’s email. The email is withdrawn. Then the email is distributed again.

If you work for the federal government, this is madness, not good for morale.

Russell Vought, primary author of Project 2025, is now director of the Office of Management and Budget, the nerve center of the federal government. He is a Christian nationalist. He said recently:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

What’s going on? Chaos. Disruption. A calculated effort to make the government less efficient. Why? I don’t know but I have suspicions.

In recent days, the Trump administration issued a list of more than 400 properties that were for sale. The list included the headquarters of several Departments in D.C.

Then the list was withdrawn.

Madeline Ngo of The New York Times reported:

On Tuesday, the Trump administration identified more than 440 federal properties that could be sold off, a list that included high-profile buildings like the headquarters of the F.B.I., Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.

By Wednesday morning, the entire inventory had been taken down, replaced by an agency web page that said the list of properties was “coming soon.”

The General Services Administration, an agency that manages the federal real estate portfolio, had already revised the list at least once. In the hours after it was published, about 100 properties, including many in the Washington, D.C., area, were removed.

The changes stirred up confusion over the Trump administration’s plan to offload a vast amount of federal property. Officials at the General Services Administration said the “disposal” of the buildings could help save hundreds of millions of dollars and ensure that taxpayers do not have to pay for “underutilized federal office space.” But the list swiftly came under criticism by Democratic lawmakers and some former federal officials who worried about the potential impact on government services across the country.

A spokeswoman for the agency said on Wednesday that officials have received an “overwhelming amount of interest” since releasing the list, and they expect to republish it in the near future after they evaluate initial input. The spokeswoman stressed that it will be continuously reviewed and updated. 

The original version of the list included offices of several cabinet-level departments and other large spaces used by the Agriculture Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Those were among the buildings removed when the list was whittled down to 320 properties. Still included for possible sale in that version: buildings used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as field offices for the Social Security Administration in areas like western Pennsylvania and Saginaw, Mich.

Federal buildings that were about a million square feet were marked for possible sale in Los Angeles, Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland, Memphis and Kansas City, Mo. In New York City, the properties included offices for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, along with two downtown buildings that house offices for federal prosecutors with the Southern District of New York and the Internal Revenue Service.

Though the properties are not formally listed on the market, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration said Tuesday that the agency would consider and evaluate all serious offers.