The Trump administration has made aggressive changes to the federal government since January. The resulting bureaucratic tumult in Washington, D.C., has significantly impacted the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages 8,800-plus buildings, nearly 370 million square feet of space, and commissions new federal projects; and the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), the State Department entity that handles overseas building and development projects.
Deep Cuts and Shifting Leadership
Known as the government’s landlord, the GSA has seen significant change over the last six months, including numerous efforts to sell property and downsize the federal government’s office footprint. What remains to be fully realized is the impact these changes will have on federal projects and the design standards that define them, and how shifts in design reviews and aesthetic criteria might change or limit opportunities for architects.
Cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have hit the GSA hard. As of late May, roughly 1,000 workers in the GSA’s tech division, public buildings staff, and financial offices have been let go; and more than 2,100 have taken deferred resignations, which sums to a 24 percent workforce cut in an agency that had about 13,000 staffers as of last fall.
More changes are anticipated. The GSA is currently led by Michael Rigas, a former senior advisor to the Trump-Vance transition team who was appointed in late July. But recently, Trump submitted a nominee to lead the agency: Edward Forst, former CEO of Cushman & Wakefield. The real estate executive, who would need Senate approval, has also served stints at Goldman Sachs and private equity firm Lion Capital. In addition, Michael Peters, who previously served as the GSA’s top official in charge of public buildings and oversaw a string of sales early in the second Trump administration announced he was leaving at the end of July. His replacement hasn’t been announced.
The number of staff that has been let go, combined with the new administration’s penchant for downsizing its real estate footprint, suggests there simply won’t be as much work being commissioned, and whatever is done will happen slower due to a diminished workforce. Currently, there are just a handful of new federal buildings in the pipeline, including new federal courthouses in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Hartford, Connecticut, and a new FDA building in Denver. (The GSA declined to respond to questions about how job cuts will impact the agency’s functions and how green initiatives within the GSA might be impacted by wider changes within the administration.)
Still, new initiatives keep arriving: On August 14, the GSA announced the launch of “USAi, a secure generative artificial intelligence evaluation suite that enables federal agencies to experiment with and adopt artificial intelligence at scale—faster, safer, and at no cost to them.”
Style Wars
President Trump has pushed the same vision for classical buildings that he introduced in his first term. In a memo issued on Inauguration Day, January 20, he stated that federal building design should “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” The memo also said any exceptions need to be run by him first.
A 2020 executive order (EO) issued during Trump’s first term as president encouraged pre-World War II styles, like Beaux Arts, gothic, and art deco, while specifically calling out Brutalism and Deconstructivism as disfavored styles. The January 20 memo recalled Trump’s previous EO, which was misunderstood and misquoted, according to Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society. Shubow argues that neoclassical federal buildings are what the public has repeatedly said it wants.
Efforts to reignite the style wars have led the AIA and others to decry a lack of design freedom. The AIA said the existing White House memo was “lip service,” and that nothing had really changed at the GSA. The organization expects a forthcoming EO that will make more explicit changes in the coming weeks. This may be another attempt to revise the guiding principles for federal architecture, laid out by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1962. There is also speculation that forthcoming changes may route projects through a design reviewer, someone like Shubow, to ensure stylistic conformity.
The push for neoclassical aesthetics has certainly caused consternation among many architects, and a fear that new commissions won’t attract contemporary, big-name architects likely to favor a modern aesthetic.
There haven’t been explicit pushes, yet, to change the sustainability guidelines of GSA projects: Those are still codified in the P100 federal standard and Energy Independence Security Act of 2007, which push for more energy-efficient federal buildings. What might be the most obvious and immediate loss is what could have been, Nico Kienzl, senior executive director of Atelier Ten, told AN.
The Biden administration, in part through Inflation Reduction Act funding, aggressively sought to push the boundaries of federal buildings and sustainability, especially when it came to adding electric vehicle chargers, focusing on all-electric construction, and reducing embodied carbon. It’s fair to say sustainability isn’t going to be a focus during the Trump administration; the new administration already halted the Green Proving Ground program, which tested out new sustainable technology in federal buildings.
International Intrigue
There have already been noticeable shifts at the OBO beyond its removal of sustainability language, which was reported previously in AN. In late July, the OBO disbanded the Industry Advisory Group, which had provided design and security advice for overseas projects such as embassies and consular property. The OBO did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Kienzl, who had served on the group and has previously worked on federal courthouses for the U.S. government, said there are large questions about how the peer review process will work for federal projects going forward, as well as the framework for what’s called IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity) agreements, a set of pre-approved contracts for government workplaces that include a roster of top firms such as Gensler, Perkins&Will, and SOM.
Despite the whirlwind of change, it may take time for the impacts of these actions to be noticed. Construction already slowed during President Biden’s administration, Kienzl said, and the OBO’s project budget was slimmed, with remaining funding often going toward renovations and retrofits.
Regarding building aesthetics, Kienzl believes it’s likely that some more modern-leaning designs for in-progress projects might be revisited. There’s also a chance the schemes might simply “sit on the bench” for a while, waiting for money to be appropriated, a not-uncommon fate for federal design projects.
“It has been a turbulent time for every agency because of the turnover,” said Kienzl. “I think everybody’s simply scrambling to get the job done.”
Patrick Sisson is a freelancer who focuses on urbanism, technology, real estate development, and the forces that shape our cities. His work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Dwell, and The Baffler.
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