WIRED: A Map of the United States Department of Government Efficiency Selling Government Properties that are not Core to Government Operational Activity and the Office of the US Senators

WIRED reported in February that employees at the GSA were told to sell off more than 500 federal buildings, including properties that house government agencies and the offices of US senators. The list of these buildings divided the properties into “core” and “non-core” assets and designated the “non-core” assets as to be sold.

The map and table of government properties that were briefly listed, as well as the corresponding political representatives for each location, have been created by WIRED.

To create the map, WIRED cross-referenced two datasets: a list of non-core properties originally published by the GSA and an inventory of owned and leased properties. The GSA defines non-core properties as buildings and facilities that are “not core to government operations” and in a press release about the list argued that sales would provide “savings to the American taxpayer.” The IOLP, a publicly accessible database, offers detailed information on GSA-owned and leased properties across the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa.

The GSA is selling hundreds of US government properties as part of a reorganization of the federal government spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). There have been mass reductions in force, effective shuttering of entirely independent agencies, and a flurry of lawsuits that try to mitigate the damage done by DOGE to the government.

A note on the original list states that the agency’s intention is eventually to reduce the “size of the owned real estate footprint by 50 percent and the number of buildings by 70 percent. Reductions will focus on non-core general office space in the portfolio which can be moved to the private leased market if needed. Moving forward, all non-core buildings will be disposed of and their tenants will be transitioned into leases.”

Most of these properties, aside from one identified only as “Building A, 6810,” were labeled as either “Butler” or “Franconia.” According to public records, all of them are part of a large federal facility known as the Parr-Franconia Warehouse Complex, or the GSA Warehouse, which sits in Springfield and is fenced in by chain-link.

The CIA’s use of the building located at 6801 Springfield Center Drive, not all of which can necessarily be observed from street level, was first reported in 2012 by the Washington Business Journal, which in an article around the same time called the CIA’s presence in the area “perhaps the worst-kept secret in Springfield.” The most specific description of its purpose, as the publication noted, can be found in the 2011 spy-agency-focused nonfiction book Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking, by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, who write, while describing a clandestine operation: “There were two pick-and-lock specialists from the agency’s secret facility in Springfield, Virginia. The CIA trains a bunch of technical officers in a warehouse to break into houses and computers. (Whether it is currently used for these purposes is unknown.)

Jeff McKay, chair of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, says someone did not research the long history of the property or the surrounding area when they decided to demolish it. Normally a site like this wouldn’t be outed, but everyone knows it’s here, except the people who put this list together.