On March 4, 2025, a surprising announcement appeared on the website of the General Services Administration. The federal government would be selling hundreds of buildings all over the country, including one-third of those up for sale in Washington, D.C. alone.
It is astonishing to consider the implications. I lived in the city once and not happily. The best-looking buildings are covered up by brutalist monstrosities, which, as it turns out, have been empty for years. They were always in bad shape but with workers required to return, these buildings need to be either renovated or sold.
The Trump administration has chosen to conduct a fire sale of the largest, most conspicuous, and truly awful buildings in the whole of D.C. They include Agriculture, Energy, HHS, HUD, Labor, Justice, and the GSA itself. If this happens, the entire city will dramatically change for the better.
I have a special loathing for the Frances Perkins Building of the Department of Labor. Named after the very embodiment of the upper-class New England socialist reformer—no amount of state power was too much for her—the building is the worst example of architecture imaginable. It has a huge footprint in some of the most commercially viable spaces in the city, and it is shockingly ugly. One has to wonder about a time when such a building was considered modern.
With all the downsizing and cuts, hopefully reducing the federal payroll to less than half its current size, and with digitization, none of these buildings make any sense. It would be one thing if they were beautiful like the Old Executive Office Building, once the Department of War, or the original Smithsonian museum. But these buildings are eye sores and embarrassments, and give the whole city an oppressive cast.
I now understand why Trump talked so much about fixing up D.C. on the campaign trail and why he issued an executive order demanding beautiful buildings. The plan all along was to conduct a huge fire sale of properties of these postwar relics, and perhaps turn the city into a thriving commercial metropolis. Seems like a much better idea.
The GSA sale announcement, however, was pulled two days later with only a vague explanation having something to do with stakeholder input. I have no proof, but I have a theory. Federal law currently requires that the buildings go first to public sector buyers and then nonprofits.
Perhaps the following happened. The buildings went up for sale and various public-sector sources from around the country, and other NGOs and lobbying groups, put in to buy them. At that juncture, the Trump administration said absolutely not. The point is to turn the city into a happy commercial place for Americans to visit, not a garbage dump filled with flies, leeches, and parasites.
Perhaps, then, there will be legislation or an executive order that will repeal that priority list and even force another priority. The new properties must be commercial or residential or something besides public sector sources and lobbying groups. Again, I have no proof of this but the intention is clear. It will get done one way or another.
I’m very excited about both the possibility and the implications of this. It is a sign that the administrative state really is in decline. Maybe it can actually go away. The executive department needs a staff, but maybe it only needs a few buildings and not a sprawling concrete empire.
The sale of state assets has a long and interesting history. The most recent experience was after 1989 when the Soviet Union fell apart and its satellite states on the border and in Eastern Europe faced real revolution. They had to do something with the old model, and various schemes were deployed. Some were successful, while others were not.
There is no truly fair way to go about privatizing state property. Selling to the highest bidder often just means putting valuable real estate in the hands of state-connected oligarchs. Issuing stock shares to the public and having open trading can result in the same thing. This doesn’t seem right.
At the same time, for a new regime to favor its friends by showering new property titles on them is not a good look, either.
If the Trump administration were somehow to map a vision of DC that had a fair auction for precisely what they are going for here—whatever it might be, inclusive of museums, cultural centers, shopping malls, hotels, restaurants—a list of priorities could be made. The auction could be made open source on a Zillow-like site. That would reduce corruption.
In general, I’m fascinated by this whole process of what amounts to a kind of destatization of a country. We saw this play out in the Soviet Union and its allies, but now this same priority has hit Western industrialized countries too. It’s about time. We need some serious innovation and careful thinking about what happens next.
His name is Peter Uldanov, an earnest fellow who really wants to make his society great and prosperous. He seeks out answers. He gradually comes to discover that everything his government does interferes with mechanisms in society that would otherwise allow wealth creation and innovation. He repeals the controls one by one, selling property, freeing prices, allowing business creation, getting rid of the pillaging of the public and permitting wide property ownership. Prosperity dawns.
What’s fascinating about the book is how it traces the intellectual process that drives Uldanov to make these decisions. He just wants to know what works best for his people and thereby gradually discovers freedom.
He concludes, “No single mind, no group of minds, can know enough to plan the work and lives of millions. Only the millions themselves, acting freely, can adjust their efforts to their needs.” He further says, “When each man is free to work for himself, and to keep what he earns, he will produce more than when he is a slave to the state.”
We might be seeing something similar taking place with the Trump administration now, which really wants to leave a legacy of greatness, prosperity, and a new golden age. The only way to get from here to there is through more freedom. That means reducing the government’s footprint on society. Regulations must be repealed. Agencies must be dismantled and abolished. Wars have to stop. Even mighty special interests have to be caged.
If this is what is happening, it will be without precedent in the modern industrialized history in the West. It will be the first time that dramatic reductions in state power will have occurred on a large scale. Not even Ronald Reagan could manage this because he was focused on fighting the Cold War. That is no longer an issue, so the restoration of real freedom emerges as the top priority.
