Coming to your neighborhood
Hundreds rallied in front of Asheville, North Carolina’s federal building on Tuesday to protest the Trump administration’s dismantling of government programs and agencies.
Hours later, they found out that the Trump administration has put the facility up for sale. They are not just closing agencies, they are selling off government assets (New York Times):
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.
Among the properties on the original list are Washington, D.C.’s Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice building and the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the F.B.I. (And you thought Kash Patel meant to make Hoover into a museum.)
The administration had also identified the headquarters for the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Energy Department, the Labor Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and even the General Services Administration. Large office buildings used by the Agriculture Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were included.
Also up for sale is the Veach-Baley Federal Complex here in Asheville (at top). The facility houses the National Climatic Data Center (renamed the National Centers for Environmental Information in 2015). It is the nation’s repository for weather information gathered by NOAA (Wikipedia):
In addition to archiving data, NCEI develops products and services that make data readily available to scientists, government officials, the business community, academia, non-governmental organizations, and the general public.
If Elon Musk et al. have anything to say, all that “readily available,” taxpayer-funded weather information used by pilots, farmers, fisherman, local TV weathermen, wedding planners, etc. will be privatized and sold back to the people who paid for it already.
But not to worry, says an opinion column in The Hill. Selling off these properties to developers at auction to turn into apartments and condos is a win-win for America. It will help ease the housing crisis.
Iconic government buildings in Chicago and elsewhere across the country will go on the auction block. Whenever the link goes live again, check your state for what else Trump is putting up for sale. Maybe you can get a bargain.
Here in the Cesspool of Sin, we knew we’d be a target.
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