The federal government sold a massive Washington, D.C., office building on Wednesday, a property that sat completely empty for a full year while taxpayers kept footing the bill for its upkeep.
The General Services Administration confirmed the sale of the former GSA Regional Office Building at 301 7th St. SW to private developer Dalian Development, a deal Sen. Joni Ernst said would save Americans more than $205 million.
The building, a hulking structure originally built between 1929 and 1932 as a warehouse and later converted to office space, had been vacant since March 2025. For twelve months, nobody worked there. Nobody needed to be there. But the lights stayed on, the maintenance bills kept coming, and the American taxpayer kept writing the check.
The sale price: $24.26 million, according to the Washington Times. The 940,000-square-foot property marks the first federal building sold under the Trump administration's broader push to shrink the government's bloated real estate portfolio. GSA Administrator Edward C. Forst framed the deal in blunt terms.
"This move demonstrates GSA's commitment to President Trump's agenda to shrink the federal real estate portfolio to a better core that focuses on workspace needs and agency missions."
Dalian Development plans to convert the building into a multi-use facility with residences, restaurant space, and stores, the kind of productive, tax-generating use that a vacant government warehouse could never provide.
The sale price alone doesn't capture the scope of the savings. Ernst, the Iowa Republican who has spent years pushing to offload empty federal properties, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the deal removes a far heavier burden from taxpayers' shoulders.
"With this sale, we are saving Americans over $205 million and taking an additional $500 million in required updates off taxpayers' tab."
Read those numbers again. Over $200 million in deferred maintenance costs. Another $500 million in upgrades the government would have eventually been forced to fund. And $5.5 million per year in operating costs, for a building where no one worked.
Ernst posted on X after the sale closed, writing: "I've been working to put Washington's empty government buildings up FOR SALE. Now @USGSA's Regional Office Building in D.C. is officially SOLD. That's millions saved for taxpayers!"
The bipartisan Public Buildings Reform Board praised the move in a statement sent to reporters Wednesday. The board noted that the Regional Office Building was among properties it had recommended for disposition or consolidation, included in its Second Round Report issued in May 2025.
The sale of one building barely scratches the surface of the federal government's real estate problem. A report released March 5 by the Public Buildings Reform Board estimated it would cost $50 billion to clear the maintenance backlog across GSA's entire portfolio, more than twice what the agency had previously estimated.
The report described GSA's maintenance funding as "chronically underfunded," noting that the agency "has historically received funds equal to about 0.375% of the portfolio's Functional Replacement Value (FRV), far below the industry standard of 2, 4% considered sustainable."
That gap between 0.375 percent and the 2-to-4-percent industry standard is not a rounding error. It represents decades of deferred decisions, deferred repairs, and deferred accountability, all while the federal government kept acquiring, leasing, and holding properties it didn't need and couldn't maintain.
The GSA Regional Office Building is hardly an isolated case. The federal government is sitting on a staggering inventory of unused or underused real estate, and the numbers keep piling up.
The United States Postal Service admitted in January that 285 of its buildings across the country are partially or completely unused. Two hundred eighty-five buildings. Just one agency.
The Department of Agriculture told a similar story. A February report found that even after a return-to-the-workplace mandate doubled building usage, the agency is still only using a third of the space in its D.C. headquarters. A mandate that doubled attendance, and the building is still two-thirds empty. That's how deep the vacancy problem runs.
Ernst laid the groundwork for this fight well before the current administration took office. In December 2024, she released a 60-page report documenting findings from her investigations into federal telework policies. The report argued that the liberal remote-work policies established during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued through the Biden administration left office buildings largely vacant, and that the resulting environmental quality in those workplaces deteriorated as a consequence.
The sale of the 301 7th St. building is one piece of a much larger effort. The Trump administration has signaled its intent to sell off a wide swath of federal properties deemed unnecessary. The GSA initially published a list of more than 440 federal properties identified for possible disposal, AP News reported, then reduced the list to 320 entries before removing it entirely.
Properties initially flagged included some of Washington's most prominent addresses, FBI headquarters, the Department of Justice building, the Old Post Office, and headquarters for the Labor Department and HUD. GSA said it was targeting buildings "not core to government operations" and argued the sales could reduce spending on vacant or underused space. The agency later clarified that appearing on the list did not mean a property was immediately for sale.
The effort extends beyond Washington. The administration has also reportedly looked at selling the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco, an 18-story property opened in 2007 at a reported cost of $144 million. That building has faced years of criticism over crime, safety issues around the property, and high costs. In 2023, hundreds of HHS employees assigned there were told to work from home because of worsening safety concerns, the New York Post reported.
A $144 million federal building where workers were sent home because the neighborhood was too dangerous. That's the kind of asset management taxpayers have been funding.
The GSA's press release confirmed the buyer and the broad terms, but several questions remain open. The specific terms of the sale beyond the reported $24.26 million price have not been publicly detailed.
The exact composition of the $500 million in "required updates" Ernst cited has not been itemized. And the timeline for Dalian Development's planned conversion, residences, restaurants, retail, remains unclear.
Those are fair questions. But they don't diminish the core fact: a building that served no government purpose for a full year has finally been moved off the federal books and into productive private use.
The story of 301 7th St. SW is a case study in how the federal government accumulates obligations it cannot justify. A warehouse built nearly a century ago, converted to offices, eventually emptied out, and then maintained at taxpayer expense while producing nothing. No services delivered. No missions supported. Just costs.
Ernst put it plainly in her statement Wednesday:
"Even though this building has been vacant, the American people have still been footing the bill."
That one sentence captures the problem better than any policy paper. The federal government's default setting is to hold, maintain, and spend, regardless of whether a property serves any purpose. Selling a building requires an affirmative decision. Keeping one empty requires only inertia.
With a $50 billion maintenance backlog, 285 empty postal buildings, and entire agency headquarters running at a third of capacity, the 301 7th St. sale is a start. One building down. The question is how many hundreds more will sit vacant before the same common sense is applied.
When the government can't even stop paying to heat a building nobody uses, the problem isn't funding. It's culture.
