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By Margaret Renkl
Ms. Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, reports from Nashville on flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.
When officials at the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s real estate holdings, announced on March 4 that they had identified 440 government-owned buildings for potential sale, they noted that taxpayers should not be paying “for empty and underutilized federal office space.” If you accepted that statement as a true accounting of the Trump administration’s motives, you probably gave the matter no more thought. Why should Americans be paying to maintain empty office space?
But as with nearly everything else this administration does, the real truth is in the details. And many of the buildings on the original list were not “underutilized” at all. They were simply being used for government work that the president didn’t like or by government officials whom the president wanted to punish. All on the grounds that they were “not core to government operations.”
