I think I can guess why Perry changed his mind. Ben Peters of The Washington Business Journal, who broke the story Wednesday, observed that Rich Butterworth, senior analyst and adviser with the Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal within the General Services Administration (the executive branch agency that manages federal real estate) told the Public Buildings Reform Board in June that selling the Cohen would require “extremely expensive” construction work to separate the Cohen’s heating and other infrastructure from its sister federal building across C Street. The sister building, the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Federal Building, was built at the same time as the Cohen and by the same architect. It’s in use by the Health and Human Services Department, and the federal government has no interest in selling it. One month after Butterworth brought this news to the Public Buildings Reform Board, the GSA de-listed the Cohen building as a property for sale.
Perry’s bill will help save the Cohen, but it’s not ideal. The House should remove the troublesome parts if (I’m tempted to say “when”) the Democrats retake the chamber in January. The troublesome parts are a series of conditions placed on the Cohen remaining in federal hands. The Cohen must be used as a “swing space to facilitate the sale or major renovation of other federal buildings.” The Trump administration and the District of Columbia government are trying to create a retail and residential district in D.C.’s Southwest quadrant between the National Mall and the Potomac River, which will require the sale of other federal properties in that area (including, possibly, the Cohen if this bill doesn’t pass). I’m not sure the planning of these sales, or of renovating other federal buildings, requires a space quite so vast as the 1.2 million-square-foot Cohen, but so be it.
It would be great if the Cohen’s swing space could be used to renovate the Cohen building itself, which the GSA estimated in 2025 (in a report later suppressed by the Trump administration) to cost about $1 billion. But Perry’s bill stipulates that expenditures on retaining the Cohen may “not exceed any savings realized by the sale or major renovation of any other Federal building.” Savings from building sales aren’t likely to be large. Earlier this year, the GSA sold two Southwest D.C. properties at prices so embarrassingly low—in one instance, for less than one-tenth market value—that the Public Buildings Reform Board suggested all Southwest sales be suspended. And I’m skeptical that any federal building renovation can be shown to save an amount even approaching $1 billion (though the $2.5 billion cost of renovating the Fed, about which Trump is famously apoplectic, well exceeds the proposed cost of renovating the Cohen). The Perry bill thus effectively blocks renovating the Cohen, which needs renovating pretty desperately.
