Updated: Wednesday, March 13 at 9:18 a.m. ET
The Office of the General Counsel (OGC), otherwise known as the legal team within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is closing six of its 10 regional offices.
OGC has a national headquarters in Washington, D.C. and divisional offices in D.C. and Maryland for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), civil rights, public health and more. It also has 10 regional offices, which will now be consolidated into four in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City and Philadelphia.
Regional offices in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle will close. They serve 27 states and five territories.
In some cases, these regional offices are situated within federal buildings temporarily listed on a non-core property list published last week by the General Services Administration (GSA). This list suggested the government is comfortable divesting federal buildings from its national footprint. The list was unpublished after being online for just one day and has not yet been republished.
The Boston regional office, for example, is held within the JFK Federal Building, a 838,000-square-foot building once listed on the GSA non-core property list. Also listed were the homes of the Chicago and San Francisco regional offices.
HHS did not immediately return a request for comment asking how employees at these closed offices will be impacted. The Huffington Post reported the office is planning to reduce the workforce closer to its 2019 staffing levels. Lawyers at these officers enforce nursing home and hospital standards, as well as the Head Start program.
OGC Acting General Counsel Sean Keveney said the downsizing will provide the "same geographic support for regional HHS offices at lower operating costs" and will advance the Make America Healthy Again mission.
The office also created a Chief Counsel for Food, Research and Drugs to supervise the chief counsel at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health branch of OGC. It will be led by Robert Foster, the current FDA Chief Counsel and Deputy general Counsel in OGC. At the FDA, he was supposed to be replaced by Hillary Perkins, who spent six years at the Department of Justice. However, she resigned from the position less than one day later.
An updated list of federally-held properties eligible for offloading will be online again in the near future, a GSA spokesperson told Fierce Healthcare March 5.
The list of more than 440 federal buildings identified as nonessential was quietly pulled offline March 5, one day after the administration announced plans to divest a significant percentage of the nation's real estate footprint, to comply with a Feb. 26 executive order. The federal government revealed March 4 it is trying to offload “non-core properties” to downsize its property holdings, with the HHS headquarters and CMS buildings included on the list.
But by the following day, the list was entirely removed, and the webpage's heading was titled "Non-core property list (Coming soon)."
"Since publishing the initial list, we have received an overwhelming amount of interest," said a GSA spokesperson. "We anticipate the list will be republished in the near future after we evaluate this initial input and determine how we can make it easier for stakeholders to understand the nuances of the assets listed."
The GSA said there are more than 440 non-core assets under the government’s control, primarily consisting of office space and totaling nearly 80 million in rentable square feet and more than $8.3 billion in recapitalization needs.
"To be clear, just because an asset is on the list doesn't mean it's immediately for sale," said the spokesperson. "However, we will consider compelling offers (in accordance with applicable laws and regulations) and do what's best for the needs of the federal government and taxpayer."
The Hubert Humphrey Building, the 750,000-square-foot home to HHS, was listed on the non-core property list. So were four CMS headquarter buildings in Woodlawn, Maryland and the FDA's White Oak campus in Silver Spring, home to the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). CBER has seen a mass exodus since HHS employees were first fired, reported Fierce Biotech. A regional FDA office in Bothell, Washington is also listed.
“Decades of funding deficiencies have resulted in many of these buildings becoming functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal workforce,” the agency said. “We can no longer hope that funding will emerge to resolve these longstanding issues. GSA’s decisive action to dispose of non-core assets leverages the private sector, drives improvements for our agency customers, and best serves local communities.”
GSA said the country will potentially save more than $430 million in annual operating costs. The department is considering the use of sale-leasebacks, ground leases, public-private partnerships and interagency co-working agreements to “drive full optimization.”
Additionally, there are hundreds of government lease terminations listed on the DOGE website, spanning agencies such as CMS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), FDA, the Veterans Benefits Administration, food and nutrition buildings within the Department of Agriculture, Indian Health Services, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Federal Trade Commission, among numerous other agencies.
“Given Donald Trump’s checkered legacy in the private sector of multiple bankruptcies and real estate deals gone awry, forgive me if I’m more than a little skeptical when that dubious record gets applied to the public sector,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, in a statement. "I’m nowhere near convinced this fire sale of federal assets throughout Oregon is in the best interest of U.S. taxpayers who paid for these facilities or for all Oregonians who depend on them for a reliable power grid, a functional court system, constituent services and more.”
The FDA alone had 30 lease terminations listed across 23 states as of March 6. Another dozen terminations affect the Indian Health Service. The estimated savings were $660 million, but the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) quietly downgraded that figure to $468 million.
Most of the terminated leases are classified as "via mass mod," meaning multiple contracts were changed at once. The other terminations were due to consolidation.
Agencies are tasked by the Office of Personnel Management, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and DOGE to create reorganization plans with new departmental hierarchy charts, “undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force,” and sell unneeded federal buildings.
DOGE architect Elon Musk and the Trump administration are forcing federal workers to return to the office, in some cases moving relocating across state lines, even when it’s not clear there is office space available for them. That will be complicated if federal buildings are sold and workers are displaced further.