In April 1942, Edward B. Rowan, the assistant chief for fine arts at President Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Buildings Administration, wrote the painter Ben Shahn about some frescoes Shahn was creating for a new federal office building in Washington, D.C. “On Friday I found it convenient to go to the Social Security Building and see your murals,” Rowan wrote:

and I want to congratulate you on this work.… The most exciting section of the painting, to me, was the figure examining the wheat in the lower right hand section. It is my feeling that you have never done a finer figure and I was very much excited over this passage. The mural on the east wall seems to be developing most satisfactorily and the color was particularly impressive and beautiful in pattern.

This fan letter was one of several historic documents, most of them technical, collected by the Smithsonian four years ago to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of an artwork that could be rubble this time next year—if not sooner. The Social Security Building, which is now called the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, is on a list of 45 buildings designated by the General Services Administration for “accelerated disposition” in 2025. Employees of Voice of America, the agency that resides there, received notices last Friday that they will soon vacate the building, and on Wednesday the Trump administration sped up that process by using the government shutdown as an excuse to furlough them all.

In addition to the Shahn frescoes, the Cohen building contains distinguished New Deal murals by Philip Guston and (I neglected to mention in an earlier post) Seymour Fogel and the ironically named Ethel and Jenne Magafan. Gray Brechin, founder of a nonprofit called the Living New Deal, which uses creative crowdsourcing to track the fate of New Deal art around the country, told me the Cohen building is “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”

If the Cohen building gets sold, Daniel Leckie, who until last winter was a member of GSA’s historic preservation team, told me, the buyer will “likely tear it down” because the cost of renovating it is too high. “The private sector can’t renovate that building in a profitable way,” Leckie said. “It’s something that only the government would be able to do.”

It’s unlikely the Cohen will sell for anything approaching its market worth. Three other buildings on GSA’s must-sell-now list are, like the Cohen, situated in Southwest D.C. (though only the Cohen was built during the New Deal). Selling all four at the same time guarantees they’ll go cheap—and that’s before we take into account that Southwest D.C.’s vacancy rate is a dispiriting 15.4 percent. (Anything above 10 percent is a problem.)

Most New Deal–era buildings in Washington are in pretty good shape. The Interior building (built in 1936) is a jewel. The Environmental Protection Agency building (built in 1934), which for years headquartered........

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