You’ll Never Guess Who’s Saving the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal

A Freedom Caucus veteran just pushed a bill through a House committee that grants a reprieve to Cohen Building. Go figure.

Nearly two years after an unnoticed amendment to a water resources bill mandated the sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building—a government structure facing the National Mall that contains precious murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and others, which has been called by a leading preservationist “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal”—a House committee approved Tuesday a bill that would allow the Cohen to remain in government hands. It’s the first such legislation to make any headway at all. (I’m a little obsessed with the Cohen. For my earlier pieces about it, click here, here, here, here, and here.)

The Cohen building’s plight has conjured some strange bedfellows. The sponsor of the bill to save it is Rep. Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, whose mission statement expressing support for “limited government” is the very antithesis of the social welfare programs celebrated in the Cohen building’s artworks.

Perry is a sworn enemy of the Cohen building’s chief tenants, the Voice of America and its parent agency, the United States Agency for Global Media, or USAGM. In 2022 Perry wrote that VOA had “abandoned its sacred mission to authentically promote our Nation’s interests,” and that this was “a dereliction of duty.”

Then, in 2023, Perry introduced a bill that he described as requiring federal agencies “to use at least 60 percent of their office space or sell........

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