Trump Administration To Offload Another HQ Building By Combining Agency Offices
The Trump administration is preparing to offload another federal agency headquarters in D.C. And it’s doing so by moving two agencies into the same building.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management is planning to relocate to the General Services Administration’s World War I-era headquarters near the White House following a planned renovation of the 814K SF property, the agencies announced Monday afternoon.
The move to combine the agencies at 1800 F St. NW would allow the government to offload OPM’s Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, a 500K SF property a few blocks away at 1900 E St. NW.
At a Monday press event, officials said OPM’s headquarters is a little over 50% occupied. Meanwhile, 40% of the GSA’s headquarters is usable. The renovation, planned to make the entire GSA building usable, is intended to solve both issues.
“What we’re launching today is a groundbreaking partnership,” GSA Administrator Edward Forst said Monday afternoon. “GSA and OPM are working together to maximize every square foot and deliver real value to the American people.”
He was joined at a press conference at his agency's headquarters building by Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who has been involved in the federal disposition process, and OPM Director Scott Kupor.
The move is part of a push by the Trump administration’s real estate arm to colocate agencies, with the goal of freeing up owned buildings for disposition.
At a congressional subcommittee hearing last month, Forst told lawmakers that the agency was looking at three or four different colocation opportunities.
“Today is about action,” Forst said Monday. “For too long, the federal government has paid for space it doesn't use, buildings it cannot afford to maintain and, in some cases, cannot even occupy. That ends now.”
During the renovation, the GSA plans to move into OPM’s building, starting in July. Both agencies would then move back into the renovated GSA headquarters in December 2028.
The agency has asked Congress for $239M that has yet to be appropriated for the renovation. In a release Monday, the GSA said it would be using “other available funding to start the initial designs in the months ahead.”
The first Trump administration had plans to merge OPM and GSA but later did away with them. Kupor said at Monday’s event that there are no plans to merge the agencies.
OPM’s planned move into the GSA headquarters was informed by data required to be collected by the Utilizing Space Efficiently and Improving Technologies Act of 2023, or USE IT Act, that was released last month. It showed the 23 largest agencies are all using less than 60% of their footprint and none of the 9,766 government spaces measured between Jan. 12 and March 6 had a utilization rate of 60% or more.
The Trump administration has been moving to make progress in the longstanding effort to shrink the federal portfolio, with the goal of garnering cash from offloaded buildings and saving on upkeep and deferred maintenance costs.
A study by the congressionally created Public Buildings Reform Board last month found that federal buildings have a $50B deferred maintenance and repair backlog.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has been conducting a round of agency musical chairs, moving agencies into other underutilized agency spaces to free up buildings to offload.
The administration is moving the Department of Housing and Urban Development out of its brutalist behemoth near L’Enfant Plaza and into the National Science Foundation’s leased space in Alexandria. And it is relocating NSF to backfill space that has been vacated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office nearby.
That shift will free up the 1.1M SF Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in D.C., which has been earmarked for accelerated disposition.
The administration is also planning to move the FBI out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building and into the U.S. Agency for International Development’s now vacant footprint at the Ronald Reagan Building. The move would free up the crumbling 2.8M SF Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue for potential redevelopment.
And last month, the Trump administration announced a plan to move the Department of Energy out of the 1.8M SF James V. Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue and into the Department of Education headquarters, while moving Education to leased space previously occupied by the now gutted USAID. Forrestal has also been slated for accelerated disposition.
The administration completed its first major D.C. headquarters disposition a month ago when it sold the GSA’s nearly 1M SF former Regional Office Building at Seventh and D streets southwest to Dalian Development for $24.3M.
The GSA has also slated the Department of Agriculture's massive South Building and the Wilber J. Cohen Federal Building for accelerated disposition. The WWI-era Liberty Loan Building at the Tidal Basin is under contract to be sold.
