Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wants a Menlo Park campus gone. So Uncle Sam will auction off the former home of the U.S. Geological Survey office.
The U.S. General Services Administration, which oversees federal real estate, will hold a gavel over the 17-building office and research campus at 345 Middlefield Road, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported.
The GSA will auction the 17-acre campus through a sealed-bid auction, according to a webpage created for the property. Bids in the blind auction, which opens to the public on April 15, start at $85 million. Prospects will place competing bids without seeing other offers.
The property is the former site of a U.S. Geological Survey office, a federal bureau responsible for monitoring and analyzing natural hazards.
The Vincent E. McKelvey Federal Building, built in 1996, the largest on the Menlo Park campus, has offices, laboratories and a library, according to the GSA. The agency leased more than 300,000 square feet for years until it began moving in 2019 to new offices near NASA, in Mountain View.
Its lease was included in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s growing list of lease cancellations, according to the Business Journal. DOGE also canceled leases for the Internal Revenue Service office in San Mateo and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office in San Jose, KRON4 reported. Together the three leases could provide nearly $11 million in savings, the publication said.
The Menlo Park property, marketed for redevelopment, includes 17 buildings built between 1953 and 1995. Many of the buildings are offices and labs.
The site comes with a vacant cafe and credit union, and a childcare center occupied by GeoKids, an early childhood development facility. Geokids’ lease expires on Aug. 31 and will be extended for another year, an unidentified GSA spokesperson told the newspaper.
Read more
