Trump Officials Mark Hundreds of Federal Properties for Potential Sale

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it could sell hundreds of federal properties around the country, including offices for the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

Officials at the General Services Administration, an agency that manages the federal government’s real estate portfolio, originally said they had identified more than 440 properties that they could “dispose of” in an effort to ensure that “taxpayers no longer pay for empty and underutilized federal office space.”

By Tuesday evening, however, the list of buildings deemed “not core to government operations” had been trimmed to 320 properties, removing a number of high-profile buildings, many of them in Washington, D.C.

Still, the effort amounted to an aggressive attempt by the Trump administration to offload a vast amount of federal property, and it immediately raised questions about how the move could affect government services across the country and federal workers who have been ordered to return to the office. It also advanced a major priority for Elon Musk’s government overhaul operation, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which has fixated on eliminating “underutilized” federal office space.

The original list had included the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice building and the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the F.B.I. headquarters.