Elon Musk, DOGE Weaponize Real Estate in Federal Morale Fight

More drips are emerging on what Elon Musk has planned for the federal government — and the tenuous state of its real estate holdings.

The billionaire and the Department of Government Efficiency are aiming to liquidate as much as half of the government’s nonmilitary holdings, the Washington Post reported. The change appears to be a moving target — previous reports put the government’s planned selloff of real estate at closer to two-thirds of its stock — but the secrecy and speed of Musk’s moves are keeping the industry on its toes.

The size of the slash to government real estate remains unclear, but Musk’s team appears poised to depress morale among the workforce and increase attrition, sources familiar with internal conversations at the Government Services Administration told the outlet. Musk’s team has taken over the GSA, which is charged with overseeing the government’s real estate portfolio.

“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” said a senior GSA official. “I think that’s the larger goal here, which is [to] bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.”

DOGE employees have told GSA managers of a plan to automate a majority of jobs at the agency as part of a playbook it’s replicating at other government agencies: gain access to troves of data, thwart oversight and make changes as it sees fit.

In an email last week, acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian warned that thousands who lived more than 50 miles from a service station in the agency would likely to be reassigned to even farther away. Adding insult to injury, the reassignments may not be made until after the deadline for federal workers to accept buyout offers, which unions have told members they could pursue legal action against.

Musk, a “special government employee,” has leaders at the GSA discussing a 50 percent cut to the budget, the New York Times reported last week. Ehikian also told staff to consider implementing “zero based budgeting.” The move is a tactic Musk previously deployed after his takeover of Twitter, which saw a reduction of budgeting and contracts to nothing before rebuilding what’s necessary from scratch.

— Holden Walter-Warner