The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) lease terminations sweeping across the country are affecting a number of federal buildings and office spaces in Alaska, but at least one landlord in Fairbanks isn’t ready to nix their agreement without first mounting a challenge.
According to GSA data, the agency facilitates more than 7,500 leases for federal workplaces and other structures nationwide, about 90 of which are in Alaska.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has targeted some of those federal holdings as part of ongoing cost-cutting measures, calling them “vacant” or “underutilized.”
But that’s not how Tania Clucas sees the Alaska Public Lands Information Center, which is part of the National Park Service and has been housed in the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in downtown Fairbanks for the last 17 years.
And, Clucas said, the public lands center has to exist somewhere in town as part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, commonly known as ANILCA.
“The public lands information center is required to exist in Fairbanks, and Anchorage, and Tok. We’re all required to have them. So, therefore, just terminating the lease is not necessarily the right thing to follow the law,” she said.
Clucas is the executive director of the Morris Thompson Center, where almost 140,000 people visited in 2024, according to the organization’s records. Besides the park service, the cultural center also leases building space to Tanana Chiefs Conference and the local tourism organization, Explore Fairbanks.
Clucas said she watched two NPS probationary employees at the public lands center get fired in February, and she understood the federal cuts could come for the lease next. But the email doing so still caught some people off guard.
“To suddenly have somebody that you have collaborated with and worked with to be gone is – I’d say there’s a bit of just shellshock, and just wondering what’s going to come next,” she said.
The email notifying Clucas that the federal government was concluding its lease of space at the Morris Thompson Center says the term will end on Dec. 31 of this year, and that no rent will accrue after that date. The agreement had been set to expire in 2028.
That makes a first among tenants at the cultural center, she said.
“There has been some, essentially, strong negotiations back and forth on the lease terms and who was responsible for what and what space they’re using, but nothing with, ‘we’re gonna close shop and walk away,’” Clucas said.
The public lands center inside Morris Thompson isn’t the only place the federal government wants to close up shop.
The DOGE website shows that the GSA has slashed about 750 leases thus far, saying that has downsized GSA’s nationwide footprint by almost 10 million square feet and saved $660 million.
On that list of 750, nine apparently terminated agreements are spread across Alaska, including locations in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Seward, Palmer, Juneau and Wasilla.
But it’s not yet clear if each of those leases has actually met an early end.
A voicemail left with the Fairbanks U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation office, which DOGE says has a terminated lease, was not returned in time for this story. And Alaska-based and regional officials for other federal agencies in Alaska referred questions to their national press offices, not all of which immediately returned requests for comment.
Answering a request to confirm that a lease for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service office in Palmer had been terminated, as indicated on the DOGE website, a USDA spokesperson said in a statement that agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins supports President Trump’s directive to eliminate “wasteful spending.”
The spokesperson also said that “USDA is optimizing building capacity and consolidating underutilized offices to reduce inefficiencies while continuing to prioritize frontline services for farmers, ranchers, and rural communities.”
Reached by phone Tuesday, a GSA spokesperson declined to answer questions attempting to confirm the lease terminations. The spokesperson said in an emailed statement that GSA aims to “deliver cost-effective workspace solutions for its federal agency customers, enabling them to fulfill their missions for the American taxpayer.”
In addition to the nine Alaska buildings on the DOGE termination list, Democrats in the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources released a separate document that contains another three Alaska locations where the federal government plans to move out. Two of those are National Park Service spaces in Fairbanks: one is the public lands center at Morris Thompson, and the other is the NPS building on Geist Road.
The building owner at the Geist Road location declined comment for this story, but a source who requested not be named for fear of retaliation said NPS employees in Fairbanks have not been told where they will work if the terminations go through.
And for Clucas, at least, the decision to end the lease with the Morris Thompson Center doesn’t seem like an example of government efficiency.
The federal government invested $14.6 million to the Morris Thompson Center’s creation in the early 2000s, according to the organization’s figures. Clucas said the three lessees also run programs that complement each other in their service to the public.
“This is an organization that from when it first started being developed 25 years ago … they were looking to maximize their efficiencies at that time and looked to see where they had a shared mission,” she said.
The federal government’s lease covers about 40% of the Morris Thompson Center’s operating budget, or about $400,000 annually, according to Clucas.
And if the federal government packs their bags before the lease was supposed to be up and she can’t find another tenant, there could be repercussions for the organization.
“Who knows how long we could keep the building open with that much of an impact on our budget?” she said.