The “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” May Be Saved!

The Trump administration signals it may keep the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building and its priceless murals after all.

For nine months I’ve been making a stink about the Trump administration’s imminent sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses the richest store of New Deal murals in Washington, D.C., including a series of Ben Shahn frescoes, situated along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, that would be very, very hard to remove (and require a great deal of expertise to preserve). Shahn judged these murals “the best work I’ve done,” and I don’t disagree; they’re stunning to see in person.

Now there’s good news to share. On Thursday the General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, signaled for the first time that it wants to cancel the sale, based on an aspect that I didn’t know about—and which has nothing to do with the Cohen being (in the words of Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal) “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”

Earlier this month I was able to report a tiny glimmer of good news—two House Republicans had voted for an appropriations amendment introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, to compel public release of a GSA feasibility study about refurbishing the Cohen. The amendment failed, but it was the first signal that we might see some bipartisan interest in saving the building. (For my earlier pieces about all this, click here, here, here, and here; see also follow-up coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.)

This week’s news is much better, and from the unlikeliest forum—a public meeting of the Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent government agency that, in a May 2025 report recommended the Cohen building’s sale and gave no........

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