After 100 years, feds to finally shutter ‘temporary’ government building

To borrow from Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, few things are as lasting as a temporary government building.

That was driven home this week when the General Services Administration announced it had finalized plans to dispose of the Liberty Loan Federal Building, which when it was completed in 1919 was billed as a “temporary structure” to help the government deal with a surge of needs from World War I.

The current government tenants will move out by next spring. Then the GSA, the federal landlord agency, will dispose of the property in the District of Columbia.

Melanie Gilbert, the GSA’s acting administrator for the capital region, said the closure is part of a push to get agencies to give up unused space and save money by shrinking the government’s holdings.

“Moving underutilized and underperforming assets out of the building portfolio allows us to tailor a smaller federal footprint with better buildings — modernized and optimized for federal agency missions,” she said.

Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who has pushed the federal bureaucracy to downsize, said the building’s closure must be followed by others.

“It took 100 years to close a temporary government building. Taxpayers cannot wait another 100 years before we start disposing of all of the other unused office space left behind by the bureaucrats taking a permanent vacation from the office,” she said.

The building is iconic to commuters in Washington’s southern gateway because it has a highway onramp that runs through the ground floor. Engineers cut the tunnel in the 1950s to accommodate traffic across the 14th Street Bridge.

The building currently houses the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. It will move to the U.S. Mint’s headquarters nearby.

Tim Gribben, the Fiscal Service’s commissioner, sounded a sad note about giving up its “landmark” office.

“Unfortunately, we are unable to continue our tenancy there due to a number of challenges,” he said in a statement. He didn’t detail the challenges.

Ventris Gibson, director of the U.S. Mint, said his team is excited to be “sharing space” with Mr. Gribben’s team.

The GSA says the building cost $500,000 when it was erected and was meant to house 1,200 employees. It was immediately overcrowded with 1,800 people working there.

That’s decidedly different from today, with post-pandemic telework and other flexibility policies leaving many federal offices empty.

The building harkens back to a transition in government. Before World War I the federal bureaucracy was more demure in size and aspirations. The war shattered that status quo, pushing the national government into a rapid expansion.

The Liberty Loan building was part of a crash construction campaign of buildings that were supposed to be temporary. Bureaucrats were so convinced things would snap back to normal, the buildings were called tempos.

That included massive structures on the south side of Constitution Avenue near the Lincoln Memorial that housed Navy offices. They were erected by future President Franklin Roosevelt, at the time the assistant secretary of the Navy, who in 1941 would apologize for “desecrating” the city.

Roosevelt said he had the buildings put in the storied spot because he figured they would be so unsightly they would have to be torn down at the end of the war. Instead, they survived for decades, joined by a second round of tempos from World War II.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the buildings began coming down.