In its drive to sharply cut spending and shrink government, the Trump administration put for sale signs effectively on some of the federal government’s most iconic and biggest buildings in downtown Chicago Wednesday.
The General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, released an online list of 443 “non-core” properties across the country. Included on it are two Loop high-rises: the Kluczynski and Metcalfe Federal Buildings.
Also on the list of Chicago properties that the administration is ready to unload are the U.S. Post Office’s Loop Station in Federal Plaza and the regional office for the Social Security Administration, according to the GSA website.
In all, the GSA says it’s willing to sell 11 properties in Chicago. The biggest of them is the Kluczynski Building, at 230 S. Dearborn St., which has more than 1.1 million square feet of office space. Kluczynski tenants include the Department of Labor, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the GSA and district offices of the two Democratic senators from Illinois, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth.
“We are identifying buildings and facilities that are not core to government operations, or non-core properties for disposal,” the GSA said on its website.
“Selling ensures that taxpayer dollars are no longer spent on vacant or underutilized federal spaces. Disposing of these assets helps eliminate costly maintenance and allows us to reinvest in high-quality work environments that support agency missions,” the website stated.
A spokesperson for the GSA’s Great Lakes office in Chicago did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WBEZ.
The Trump administration has set a goal of selling half the buildings that the federal government owns and ending half of the leases for offices used by federal agencies across the country. It has not said what it would do with federal employees and offices that are operating within these buildings.
On Tuesday, WBEZ reported that GSA is moving to cancel leases for about 30 of the 112 private properties that the federal government rents in the Chicago area, including an old furniture warehouse in the northwest suburbs where the National Archives was storing and digitizing the presidential papers of Barack Obama’s administration.
Trump ally Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has boasted that ending that deal would save taxpayers more than $1.4 million a year, but GSA records show that the deal for the sprawling building on Golf Road in Hoffman Estates was already expected to end on Dec. 31, because the Obama presidential library will be entirely digital.
The massive real estate moves regarding federally owned properties and government-leased space come as the Chicago area office market already is facing high vacancy rates, but the new Trump administration is looking to drastically reduce the number of federal employees, and even eliminate some U.S. government agencies.
Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team.