According to reports in the local media, the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is looking to offload the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco as a cost-cutting measure that will impact two federal buildings in the city, a funny and remunerative way to heap a little humiliation on the much-disliked, on the right, congresswoman.
As background, the so-named Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is an 18-story tower that was built around two decades ago and sits on Mission and 7th streets, a terrible area known mainly for petty crime, illegal markets fencing stolen goods, and a plethora of open-air drug dealing that goes unstopped by law enforcement.
The building was formerly known as the San Francisco Federal Building until being renamed in December of 2024 to honor the woman who has sat in Congress for nearly four decades. Also to be offloaded by DOGE is the 50 United Nations Plaza building, which was built nearly a century ago in the 1930s and currently serves as the regional headquarters for the United States General Services Administration.
According to the local media reports, both properties have been marked as “non-core” federal assets by DOGE, meaning they will likely be sold off. To save money, DOGE reportedly plans on first deferring maintenance on the buildings, then selling them off, and then leasing office space for the remaining federal workers who are in need of it.
Commenting on the move to local media in quite angry fashion, former Congresswoman Jackie Speier declared that the decision is “all about payback” as Trump feuds with California, not about saving money and cutting costs. Speier said, “It’s another example of how he is coming after Democrats. He’s coming after California, and it’s all about payback.”
Continuing, Speier argued that in this case more money will be spent on leasing space than would have been spent on maintaining the buildings, as the federal government doesn’t pay property taxes on buildings it owns: “The lease will keep going up and you will end up paying the property taxes of the lessor, whereas you don’t pay federal taxes when you are a federal government.”
On the other side of things, however, some see the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building as a total waste of money. Namely, they think the building, designed to be “green” and costing $144 million to be built, is not only quite ugly but is a total money pit that has needlessly and senselessly wasted taxpayer dollars for decades.
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Amongst those who said as much was local developer Andy Ball, who worked on the construction project. Ball said, Fox News Digital reports, that the “green” project was a “waste of taxpayer money from day one.” He added that “No investor would have built this building” and that its costs were about “50% greater” than a private sector build would have been. He further added that it looks like it makes to sell it here, saying, “In this market, it will represent the greatest difference between cost to build and its sale value.”