In announcing its decision to move the Education Department to a smaller space, the Trump administration claimed that the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters is roughly 70 percent vacant.
But a source within the department as well as recently retired staff and former political appointees questioned that claim and how the administration reached that figure. A department spokesperson said it was calculated based on attendance numbers but declined to provide more information.
Just this week, at least four staff members in the Office of Federal Student Aid had to begin sharing desks, one source said on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job. FSA used to be in its own building. But shortly after Secretary Linda McMahon enacted a major reduction in force and FSA lost nearly half its staff, the agency moved under the same roof as ED. Now, the department has started to reverse course, hiring new staff and bringing in contracted workers, and it’s running out of space, not experiencing surplus capacity.
“My read is that declaring 70 percent vacancy is a sleight of hand,” the source said.
Another employee who retired from the department in January but is still awaiting paperwork to finalize her benefits said that up until the day she left, she would often walk laps around the office’s first five floors during her breaks. (The sixth floor was being remodeled and the seventh floor is reserved for chief political staff.) Having worked at ED for more than 30 years, she knew the building and its capacity well. What she saw was that most of it was occupied.
“I’m not gonna say it was full capacity in the sense that every single cubicle was occupied … but the offices were all full,” she said, adding that parts of the building were being renovated and the Trump administration had installed new cubicles in former conference rooms to accommodate what remained of FSA, the Institute of Education Sciences and the Office of the General Counsel, which had previously been in separate spaces. “There’s absolutely no way 70 percent of it was vacant.”
The Trump administration argues that moving buildings is a “prudent step to save hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.” But to others, it’s largely a symbolic effort to make America believe the department is dying.
McMahon has outsourced a number of her department’s grant programs and staff members to other cabinet-level agencies through a series of 10 contracts with other departments, known as interagency agreements. It’s all part of a larger effort to dismantle the department. But so far, the majority of detailed staff are still spending some of their time at the department’s current building before being shuttled to other government offices each day. A department spokesperson confirmed that this will also be the case in the new building and the 70 percent vacancy figure does not include them.
“The building that they’re talking about moving ED into is a nondescript building on the other side of the railroad tracks on D Street,” the retired staff member said. “They’re just going to hide the fact that there’s anything left and pretend that the department doesn’t exist anymore … It just made me sick.”
The decision, announced Thursday, will require all department staff to move from their current government-owned building on Maryland Avenue to a private one that previously housed the United States Agency for International Development’s annex. The operations of USAID were eliminated by the Trump administration shortly after the president took office.
The Department of Energy will move into the Lyndon B. Johnson Building in ED’s place, a swap the Trump administration says will save taxpayers nearly $350 million from deferred maintenance costs at the old DOE building and $4.8 million in operating costs for ED. (The administration says the agencies will move in August.)
“This is the government working smarter for the American people,” General Services Administration official Edward C. Forst said in a news release.
Democrats, however, have sharply criticized McMahon’s latest move. Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member of the appropriations committee, said in a social media post that by moving ED, Trump is “lighting millions of taxpayer dollars on fire with these stunts.”
A 2017 GSA document says the department’s current building consists of about 387,000 usable square feet, or between 125 to 175 square feet per person—that’s room for about 2,200 to 3,100 people. If 70 percent of that space is vacant, that would mean about 116,000 square feet would be in use, or enough space for 660 to 930 people.
Data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management shows that currently the Education Department has about 2,300 employees. Some may still be working remote or located in regional offices, so it’s not clear how many employees are working from the D.C. headquarters.
By comparison, the new building ED is moving into is 12 stories tall and has about 365,000 square feet in total. (It is unclear how many of those square feet are usable or how much space the department is leasing.)
A department spokesperson declined to comment or provide further details on how the Trump administration calculated the vacancy rate. The spokesperson did say ED reports its attendance numbers to GSA and the Office of Management and Budget, which then calculates the utilization rate.
(The spokesperson had said she would provide photos and videos of the empty building but did not do so before publication.)
Antoinette Flores, a political appointee under the Biden administration who now works at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said based on this administration’s track record, she’s skeptical about its claims of efficiency and cost savings. She pointed to inaccurate contract savings posted by the Department of Government Efficiency and a recent report from the Government Accountability Office about the costs of now-reversed layoffs in the Office for Civil Rights.
“The immediate thing that comes to mind is the administration’s recent history of making claims about cost savings that have been dramatically overstated, if not outright lies,” Flores said. “I’m sure it’s going to be the case with this, too. It’s going to be more costly than they are implying to move all of the staff and figure out how to fit them all in a building that they may not even fit in.”
