The inclusion of the William S. Moorhead Federal Building in Downtown Pittsburgh on a since-deleted list of federally owned properties that could possibly be put up for sale is raising questions about the future of the 667,000-square-foot high-rise.
The Trump administration on Tuesday released the list of more than 440 government properties that included the Moorhead Federal Building, as well as a Social Security office on Station Street in East Liberty.
According to a statement from the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s real estate portfolio, the listed properties represented buildings currently owned by the federal government deemed “non-core assets” that are “not needed for critical government operations.”
Agencies with offices located within the Moorhead Federal Building on Liberty Avenue include the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the National Labor Relations Board, to name a few. The building is also home to multiple offices that serve as a point-of-contact between Pittsburgh-area residents and federal agencies that often directly interact with the public, such as the local Social Security Administration field office, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Internal Revenue Service.
As of Wednesday morning, the list had been removed from the GSA website and replaced with a page that said the list of properties is “coming soon.” No explanation was provided on the website for why the original list had been taken down.
The Moorhead Federal Building’s inclusion on the originally published list came as a surprise to federal workers employed there.
Federal workers didn’t get any advance notice of the list, according to Philip Glover, vice president of American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents many federal office workers in Pittsburgh.
“They're ordering people into the offices from remote and telework. So I'm not sure where these people are going to work,” Glover said. “If you're ordering them off of remote and telework work and telling them to come back to federal buildings, why are you now getting rid of federal buildings before you see what that scope is? Doesn't make sense.”
In the past, a federal building or office might go up for sale because it needed upgrades or didn’t fit the needs of the current workforce. “They might look for another space, but they go back through GSA, they find another space,” Glover said. “And then they lease out or eliminate the other space. Again, this is backwards.”
The publication of the list had added to “the chaos” facing federal workers, according to Glover, many of whom have had their positions eliminated since President Donald Trump took office as part of mass layoffs initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is closely associated with billionaire Elon Musk. “The majority are like ‘This is just chaos every day. I'm coming into chaos every morning. Something else happens.’ And so I think everybody is kind of in a state of shock.”
Common practice, uncommon process
While the release of the list of properties on Tuesday took many by surprise, it’s worth reiterating the properties are not currently up for sale, but rather are being assessed for a potential sale. And the practice of selling off federally owned properties — known as “disposal” in the government parlance — isn’t new.
The way the Trump administration appears to be going about the process, however, does seem to deviate from prior practice, according to Brian Goldstein, professor of architecture and art history at Swarthmore College and former GSA employee.
“The scale and type of buildings here is new in both quantity and quality.”
Goldstein said the list of proposed buildings might indicate the GSA under the Trump administration is approaching the disposal process in a manner that is the inverse of the normal way of doing things. Typically, he said, the federal government will sell a building because it’s outdated or it simply no longer needs that much space.
In this case, he said, the GSA appears to be exploring the possibility of offloading properties first. According to Goldstein, that inverted approach could be a sign of what the administration has planned for the federal offices and their workers that currently occupy the Moorhead Federal Building.
“Given the larger recent pattern of layoffs in the federal government, it's hard not to read the proposed disposal of buildings on this scale as a means to that end,” he said.
The reassessment of the amount of space needed to accommodate workers has accelerated in most sectors of employment in recent years, as the rise of remote work in the wake of the pandemic changed workplaces across the country. In Pittsburgh, the average number of daily employees Downtown went from 70,099 Jan. 2020 to 39,299 in Dec. 2024, according to data from Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership. This has led both private companies and the government to reconsider how it uses office space.
At the federal level, the Biden administration last year sought a more ambitious approach to identify federal office buildings with underutilized office space and consolidate and sell off federally-owned properties.
And given the mass federal layoffs handed out by DOGE, an even more aggressive downsizing of federal office space would seem to fit into the Trump administration’s effort in its first month or so to rapidly shrink the federal government’s footprint.
It remains unclear why the list of properties published on Tuesday was removed by Wednesday. A call to the local GSA office in Pittsburgh — itself located in the Moorhead Building Downtown — went unanswered.
Given the confusion the initial publication of the list generated, Goldstein suspects political pressure on both sides of the aisle is behind the disappearance of the list. “Across party lines, Congress members won't love the idea of the largest federal building in their town or city being shut down,” Goldstein said. “These are economic drivers and downtown mainstays.”
Kate Giammarise and Julia Zenkevich contributed to this story.
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