A Southern California hospital has bought a federal complex known as “the Ziggurat” for $207 million, marking the most expensive U.S. government building sale ever and a win for the Trump administration’s downsizing campaign.
The Orange County deal comes after red tape from the Biden administration thwarted earlier efforts to auction off the former Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel at a starting bid of $70 million.
The General Services Administration, which manages the federal real estate portfolio, estimates that Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian’s acquisition of the 89-acre property will save taxpayers more than $340 million in deferred repairs and maintenance.
“GSA continues to deliver on President Trump’s goal of eliminating costly, vacant properties from the federal real estate portfolio,” GSA Administrator Ed Forst said Tuesday.
Hoag CEO Robert Braithwaite promised a “thoughtful, long-term approach” to replacing the 1 million-square-foot Ziggurat Building, which was the only structure in the area when it opened. A well-to-do residential enclave of 65,000 people has since sprouted up around it.
Built in 1971 to resemble an ancient Mesopotamian temple, the modernist Ziggurat housed a variety of federal agencies, but struggled for years to fill thousands of seats. The IRS and other agencies vacated it at the end of 2024.
Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who has led calls to shed government buildings that became ghost towns during pandemic telework, said that “thousands of other unneeded properties” should follow the Ziggurat.
“This property sale was tied up in bureaucratic red tape for years, but the Trump GSA quickly sold it for nearly three times the Biden administration’s asking price,” Ms. Ernst said Wednesday in an emailed statement. “That’s the art of the deal, folks, a real win-win for everyone.”
The Ziggurat was included in a list of 12 properties that the Public Buildings Reform Board, a bipartisan federal agency, recommended junking at the end of the first Trump administration in 2020. Ten were previously sold for a total of $193 million.
In April 2021, the Biden Office of Management and Budget canceled plans to sell the 12th building, housing the National Archives in Seattle.
The reform board called on Biden officials during extended pandemic telework in 2022 to dump an additional 15 crumbling properties worth $275 million, but they ignored the plan.
Last year, the Trump Office of Management and Budget adopted another list of 11 underused federal buildings the board proposed for disposal to save taxpayers $5 billion in deferred repairs. They include the Energy Department’s massive D.C. headquarters.
No buyers submitted bids when the GSA first listed the Ziggurat for auction in 2023, with a Biden administration requirement to preserve its brutalist architecture. A second attempt in 2024 resulted in a final $177 million bid and a plan to demolish the structure, but the sale did not go through.
David Winstead, a reform board member and former GSA public buildings commissioner, called this week’s $207 million transaction “one of the most significant” government property sales in history.
“This is a great win for GSA, the taxpayer, and the community,” said Mr. Winstead, a former Maryland transportation secretary under Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening. “It’s a difficult and very large building, and now they can demolish it.”
California has the highest share of the nation’s roughly 2 million federal workers after the District.
The Partnership for Public Service, a Washington-based federal government advocacy group, estimates that the Trump administration has reduced the federal workforce by 12%, or 250,000 employees, since the end of the Biden administration.
That includes a 10.3% decline in California — where over 165,000 employees comprise 8.1% of the federal workforce — from September 2024 to January 2026.
The Washington Times reached out to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for comment on the Ziggurat sale.
Mr. Newsom has responded to the government layoffs by expanding unemployment protection and offering to hire displaced federal workers for state jobs.
In an Oct. 11 statement, he accused Mr. Trump of “reckless and cruel” actions in pushing to fire federal workers during the 43-day government shutdown.
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