The Trump administration’s dramatic downsizing of the U.S. Department of Education will soon extend to the agency’s physical space.
The administration announced on Thursday that the Education Department beginning this summer will abandon its Lyndon B. Johnson building headquarters and move into a new location a block away formerly occupied by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The U.S. Department of Energy will take over the building the Education Department has occupied since its inception more than 45 years ago.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, in a statement issued jointly with the heads of the Energy Department and General Services Administration, said the move to 500 D Street SW in the nation’s capital would save her agency $4.8 million in operating costs.
Since the beginning of his second term, the Trump administration has cut the Education Department’s staff nearly in half, after the president ran on a pledge to shutter the agency. With the staff reductions—and even after consolidating other department locations—the department said 70% of the LBJ Building is now unused.
More recently, the Education Department has reached agreements to have five other federal agencies take over day-to-day management of many of its programs. Some education staff have started working in other agencies’ buildings under those arrangements.
The Department of Energy will, in turn, move out its current location at the James V. Forrestal building and assume the LBJ facility. In so doing, the administration says the Energy Department will avoid upcoming maintenance costs and save taxpayers $350 million.
"[W]e have made unprecedented progress in reducing the federal education footprint, and now we are pleased to give this building to an agency that will benefit far more from its space than the Department of Education,” McMahon said in a statement.
The Department of Education’s current headquarters sit in a vast sea of large-scale offices just south of the National Mall, a nondescript landscape that tourists who flock to museums and the U.S. Capitol never see, unless they’re in search of parking.
At least one presidential administration sought to enliven the aesthetic. The education team of President George W. Bush set up a replica of a little red schoolhouse outside the front of the agency to tout the No Child Left Behind Act, the president’s sweeping, divisive education law.
During Bush’s presidency, the Education Department building was also renamed for LBJ, the 36th president.
Trump’s administration says the move will begin in August, play out in phases and that the department’s work will not be interrupted.
In a statement, the union representing Education Department workers pointed out that the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration shuttered in its first weeks last year, previously occupied the Education Department’s new office space.
“The message the secretary’s announcement sends to our staff and the American public is clear—education is next on the chopping block,” the union’s president, Rachel Gittleman, said in the statement.
