The Department of Government Efficiency, the agency designed and headed up by billionaire Elon Musk to expose waste spending and fraud within the government, has officially terminated the lease for a facility where former President Barack Obama housed records from his administration. The site is located in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and was a part of the National Archives and Records Administration, also known as NARA, a system utilized for the preservation of presidential materials.
The main reason for cutting ties with the facility is the main mission of DOGE, which, as noted above, is to reduce waste and fraud within the federal government, easing the burden on taxpayers by exposing and cutting programs that are abusive. Many of these programs aren’t even real and are likely being used to launder money that floats back into the pockets of politicians in Congress.
Estimates say that the closure of this facility, along with the cancellation of 750 leases will save taxpayers a whopping $468 million. That’s a whole lot of cheddar.
“The Hoffman Estates facility, which was not the official Obama Presidential Library but rather a NARA-run records storage site for the main facility, contained roughly 25 million unclassified paper documents and 35,000 physical artifacts from the Obama presidency. The materials are in the process of being digitized and will be relocated to a NARA site in College Park, Maryland, by the end of Fiscal Year 2025, according to Fox News,” Trending Politics News reported.
The Hoffman Estates site has played a role in managing records from the Obama administration while the official Obama Presidential Center is still under construction on Chicago’s South Side. The center, which is privately funded and run by the Obama Foundation, is expected to open next year. The foundation has previously said that it does not operate as a traditional presidential library with a NARA-managed archive, a departure from past presidential centers. The termination of the lease aligns with DOGE’s larger strategy of reassessing the federal government’s real estate portfolio.
Under the leadership and influence of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, DOGE has been ripping, tearing, and shredding through waste spending like a rabid tiger in a cage full of elk. The ultimate goal, as made clear by both Trump and Musk, is to take efficiency models from the private sector and apply them to the government.
While the closing of the facility didn’t come as a surprise, due to NARA already planning to leave it sometime this year, the timeline being moved up goes to show that DOGE is really, really serious about cutting costs as much as possible, as soon as possible.
Folks at NARA have stated that they are digitizing the records and that project is making headway, noting the move to a facility in Maryland will have no impact on public access to materials from the Obama-era.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees government-owned buildings and leased federal spaces, currently disburses over $91 million annually for approximately 2.4 million square feet of office space spread across 112 Chicago properties, per Trepp Inc. data. According to Tom Taylor, Trepp’s senior manager of research, the government also has the option to terminate over a third of these leases by year’s end, which could withdraw roughly $30 million annually from local property owners.
Taylor then said, “In a market that’s already contending with large shifts in demand from the influence of remote work, changing the office demand paradigm, any large-scale GSA terminations could really exacerbate the existing problems with vacancy and office values in that market.”