Two federally owned office buildings in San Francisco, one dating to the 1930s and the other a contemporary architectural landmark built less than 20 years ago, are not on the drastically pared-down list of "assets for disposition" now on the General Services Administration website.

At the outset of the new, extra-chaotic Trump administration, we learned that Elon Musk et al wanted to conduct a mass sell-off of federally owned office buildings, in a spurious effort at cost-cutting that might not yield much more than a massive logistical headache for the GSA and other government agencies. Among those, of course, two office buildings in San Francisco were mentioned — and we knew these would be in the prime-target zone because Republicans love to include mentions of San Francisco in their political theater, and we encompass so much of what they teach their constituents to despise.

Musk also just got finished disposing of the lease he had at the so-called Twitter building on Mid-Market, making a show of moving the company headquarters out of San Francisco to Texas, though it's entirely unclear that any of the remaining SF employees moved at all. (And X is maintaining an office for engineers in the South Bay.)

And the newer federal building at Seventh and Mission was, only recently, named for House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, so it was an obvious choice.

The two SF buildings, the older of which houses the local offices of the GSA itself, were among two dozen federal office buildings in California identified as "non-core" assets by the new administration. And they were part of a list of such assets nationwide that ballooned to over 500 in mid-February, but then came down to 440 at some point on an official list.

That list of "Assets Identified for Accelerated Disposition" has now been cut down to just eight buildings, as the Chronicle reported Tuesday. And none of them are in California.

The list includes buildings in Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri, Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee, the largest of which is the 803,990-square-foot Peachtree Summit Federal Building, a 30-story, triangular-shaped tower built in 1975. Its tenants include the GSA, IRS, and Social Security Administration.

As the Chronicle notes, the long list of federal buildings the administration first was looking at jettisoning came as an unwelcome surprise to many members of Congress. Some of them learned about the list only in the media, and many of the buildings in question were the locations of their local offices, and in some cases were buildings they had a hand in naming.

Right, so, the king and his billionaire minion don't actually just get to bulldoze over everything without Congress making a peep, and this was the first of what will hopefully be many examples of pushback from both sides of the aisle.

The Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building, designed by Thom Mayne and Morphosis Architects and completed in 2007, could still end up being a target of Republican ire as it has been in recent years. Senator Jodi Ernst made an example of it in 2023 after a memo went out to federal workers allowing them to work from home because of the declining street conditions around the building. And it's also an example of contemporary architecture which Trump hates, and he issued an executive order at the end of his first term to only allow neo-Classical buildings to be approved henceforth. (In January, he issued a similar order promoting only "beautiful" civic architecture.)

But real estate experts questioned whether it would make any financial sense to sell the building and then lease offices elsewhere, or have to lease those offices back from a new owner. The building would likely never fetch anything close to a price that would recoup its massive construction costs, particularly in the current office market in SF, and by the time the government got through the pain of selling it, finding a new lease, and relocating offices, it would surely be a money-loser.

Previously: Report: Trump and Musk Want to Sell Off Two SF Federal Buildings

Top image: Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images