Three federal buildings that had been “designated for disposal” by the President Donald Trump administration earlier this month are no longer included in a list of 443 buildings the General Services Administration (GSA) had proposed to sell off in the coming months.
The list, which had been removed from the website for weeks and then republished Friday, has been significantly narrowed to eight office buildings, none of which are in Utah.
The three Utah buildings originally listed as “non-core assets” and proposed for sale were the Wallace F. Bennett Federal Building in downtown Salt Lake City, an Internal Revenue Service center in Ogden and a facility on Tabernacle Street in St. George. Selling the hundreds of buildings on the list, the agency said when they announced the original proposed list in early March, would lead to “potentially saving more than $430 million in annual operating costs.”
Now, GSA said on its website they plan to instead focus on disposing of just eight buildings in seven different states and put out a call for interested bidders. The agency is committed to partnering with “interested stakeholders, including local jurisdictions, homeless assistance providers, the historic preservation community, and our customer agencies to ensure their mission-critical needs are met.”
“GSA is focused on rightsizing the federal real estate portfolio to reduce the burden on the American taxpayer while also delivering space that enables its agency customers to achieve their missions,” the agency posted on the very website it used earlier this month to identify the original 443 buildings.
The agency also released an FAQ, which listed as its first question, “The first list was much longer, why is this list only eight assets?”
“Due to the overwhelming response that we received after publishing the first list, we are refining our process,” the answer read. “In order to achieve our goal, in alignment with the President’s direction, and to drive maximum value for the federal real estate footprint, we decided to use a more incremental approach.”
The buildings still included on the list were evaluated based on maintenance and operating costs, utilization, and “the availability of replacement space in the local market,” according to the FAQ. “The list will continue to be updated as we execute on our strategy to rightsize the federal portfolio.”
A spokesperson for GSA told The Salt Lake Tribune when the original list was released that the list of properties was “subject to change,” and that the agency’s Public Buildings Service was “fully committed to meeting the mission needs of our customer agencies and delivering world-class work environments for the federal workforce as they return to office.”
The decision to halt the proposed mass sell-offs comes as President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by unelected businessman Elon Musk, has dominated both national and local political conversation. Thousands of federal workers in Utah have been laid off, and, this week, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said Utah lawmakers to be more DOGE-like in the way they craft legislation.
Cox has also called for dismantling the federal Department of Education. On Thursday, the president signed an executive aimed at doing so.
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