AUSTIN, Texas — On Tuesday, President Donald Trump's administration published a list of federal buildings that it had identified to potentially offload. On that list was 24 buildings in Texas, five of which were in Austin.
Despite initial plans to offload these buildings, the entire list was deleted by Wednesday morning.
The buildings in Austin include:
- J.J. Pickle Federal Building
- IRS Service Center in southwest Austin
- The Austin Finance Center
- Stars Childcare Center
- VA Austin Auto Center
The new administration has prioritized eliminating federal office space.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency Service has listed scores of canceled office leases on DOGE’s official website, raising questions around the country about what will happen to services provided from those offices.
The administration also said it was seeking to offload federal buildings bearing the names of civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta and Rosa Parks in Detroit, and the Montgomery, Alabama, bus station that was pivotal in the civil rights movement and now serves as the Freedom Rides Museum.
In a Tuesday statement, the GSA’s Public Buildings Service had said the bulk of properties it had classified as unnecessary were office spaces.
“Decades of funding deficiencies have resulted in many of these buildings becoming functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal workforce,” the agency wrote.
It said GSA would consider the buildings’ futures “in an orderly fashion to ensure taxpayers no longer pay for empty and underutilized federal office space, or the significant maintenance costs associated with long-term building ownership — potentially saving more than $430 million in annual operating costs.”
The original list of 443 buildings spanned almost 80 million rentable square feet, the agency said.
