There Was a Plan to Save These New Deal Masterpieces. Then Trump Won.

The problem was arithmetic. Most federal buildings (the Pentagon is an exception) are owned not by the agency situated there but by GSA, which requires the agency to pay rent. As in the private rental market, the quality with which a given federal building is maintained depends on the amount of rent the tenant pays, which in turn depends on the size of the tenant’s budget.

Social Security is the single largest item in the federal budget, responsible for 22 percent of all spending, and to administer all that spending Congress gives it about $14 billion per year. The roof will seldom, if ever, leak at Social Security’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland. The U.S. Agency for Global Media, on the other hand, which includes Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and four other regional news organizations, has a budget of less than $1 billion, of which VOA must get by on less than $300 million. Consequently, the roof in the Wilbur J. Cohen building leaks pretty much all the time.

For a couple of decades, the Cabinet agency then called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, or HEW, shared the Cohen building with VOA. HEW had (and, as the Health and Human Services Department, still has) a huge budget that ought to have been sufficient to bankroll an extensive renovation of the Cohen building. But instead, HEW got Marcel Breuer to build it a brutalist new headquarters next door, completed in 1977. (Breuer’s headquarters for the Housing and Urban Development building, incidentally, is also condemned to GSA’s accelerated disposition list.)