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Dive brief:
- The White House appears to be moving forward with the demolition of four historically significant federal buildings outside of statutory processes, a former General Services Administration official said. says in a statement presented to a federal judge at a hearing this week.
- Lawyers representing the federal government said the statement is based on hearsay and there is no reason to assume the White House is acting outside official channels. “It’s wrong,” Senior Assistant Deputy Attorney General Adam Gustafson and Assistant Director Marissa Piropato said in their response to the statement. CNN reported. They said GSA is “evaluating these assets not for demolition, but for disposal, meaning transportation off federal property,” and that GSA is following the established process.
- The back-and-forth comes as historic preservationists try to block the Trump administration from painting the historically significant Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. In a lawsuitpreservationists say the renovations risk permanently damaging the building’s granite facade and do not follow legal procedures.
Diving knowledge:
The statement, filed by former GSA official Mydelle Wright, says the White House is deep in the process of selecting contractors to demolish four architecturally significant buildings: the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, the GSA Regional Office Building and the Liberty Loan Building.
Critics say the buildings are examples of New Deal-era architecture, which includes the heavy, raw concrete “Brutalist” style popular in the post-World War II era. These are “jewels of America’s architectural history and its collective heritage,” civil liberties advocate and author Judith Levine, he tells The Guardian. “They are not Trump’s to dispose of, like battered filing cabinets or outdated computers.”
Earlier this year, President Trump in an executive order said he wanted federal buildings to have a classical style and called out Brutalist architecture as something that should be left behind. “The federal government largely replaced traditional designs for new construction with modern and brutalist ones,” he said. the executive order said. “The federal architecture that followed . . . was often unpopular with Americans.”
In his statement, Wright said the White House is not acting through GSA as required by the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. “To the best of my knowledge, GSA has not conducted processes to comply with section 106 or 110(f) of the NHPA or with NEPA for this commitment for any of the four buildings,” he said.
Instead, he said, the White House, on its own, has solicited bids or is finalizing a bid package to “analyze and recommend demolition” of the four buildings.
“For the first time that I’m aware of,” Wright said, “a president is personally involved in facilitating the agency’s obligations to buildings that are national heritage, and who in the agency is going to say ‘No?'”
Gregory Werkheiser, one of the legal partners at Cultural Heritage Partners that filed the lawsuit to block the painting of the Eisenhower Building, said he did not trust GSA to have control over the remodeling and other work Trump is doing on high-profile buildings in Washington, DC. This work includes the demolition of the east wing of the White House by replace it with a ballroom which critics say will eclipse the White House itself.
GSA “does not have control over the actions of the president,” Werkheiser told the hearing. Bloomberg Law reported.
All four buildings are located in GSA list of federal buildings that the agency wants to remove because they are outdated or underutilized. the list it elicited a cry when it was released earlier this year because of the impact the buildings could have on real estate markets and the historically significant buildings included.
Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who presided over this week’s hearing, asked lawyers for both sides to be prepared to meet again soon. If he issues a ruling, he will have to decide whether to prevent the White House from moving forward with painting the Eisenhower Building until the plan has gone through the legally established process that requires reviews and public hearings to get input from experts and the public before the work is done.
