AP (“Trump and Musk demand termination of federal office leases through General Services Administration“):
One of the next moves in President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping effort to fire government employees and curtail operations is using the agency that manages thousands of federal employee worksites around the country to cut down on office space.
Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee.
The order seems to contradict Trump’s own return-to-office mandate for federal employees, adding confusion to what was already a scramble by the GSA to find workspace, internet connections and office building security credentials for employees who had been working remotely for years.
But it may reflect the Trump administration’s belief that it won’t need as many offices due to its efforts to fire employees or encourage them to resign.
[…]
As of last fall, the GSA owned and leased more than 363 million square feet of space in 8,397 buildings in more than 2,200 communities nationwide, according to the agency’s website. Those properties include courthouses, post offices and data processing centers.
[…]
“Lease terminations are the clear priority at this time,” according to a Jan. 29 email from a senior GSA manager, a copy of which was provided to the AP by a GSA employee.
In a follow-up meeting, GSA regional managers were told the goal is to terminate as many as 300 leases per day, according to the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
[…]
According to the employee who spoke to the AP, the initiative is being led by Nicole Hollander, who has been embedded in the GSA’s headquarters in recent days.
On her LinkedIn profile, Hollander describes herself as an X employee with a background in real estate, in the Washington area. Hollander’s X account — which shows that she joined in March 2015 but where posts date only to September 2023 — is full of posts related to X’s real estate acquisitions, as well as information about auctions of items from Twitter’s former offices after Musk purchased the platform.
Trump has ordered the GSA to make sure it promotes “beautiful federal civic architecture” as the president dislikes styles that are less traditional.
So, let’s just assume for the sake of argument that it’s a good idea to have a 25-year-old X employee running GSA and that terminating 7500 leases–which presumably come with 7500 contracts—is perfectly legal. Because, why not.
What I want to know is: What does President Trump get out of this?
I mean, yes, this will make getting all of the Federal employees currently teleworking back into the office more challenging. But I’m sure they’ve done a detailed analysis of space requirements and calculated that they can all work efficiently in government-owned spaces. So, let’s dismiss that objection.
But this would be 7500 landlords suddenly getting stiffed on rent payments that they were expecting, what with their being contractually obligated and all. And there will surely be a spillover onto local business owners who will suddenly lose a whole lot of customers for breakfast, coffee, lunch, dry cleaning, and the like. That would seemingly make a lot of Congressmen and Senators—some of them even Republicans!—unhappy.
Also, the thing about the courthouses would seemingly be of concern. Presumably, we’re going to have to have some sort of trials for all the criminals Trump’s team is rounding up. Not to mention jail cells, which are often co-located.
Presumably, though, this will bring down the price of eggs.
