The agencies' own 2024 report put repairs at $21.7M; DC says the move still went ahead
The District of Columbia is suing to stop HUD and Ginnie Mae from relocating their headquarters out of Washington, calling the move unlawful.
The lawsuit, filed July 27 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, names the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Government National Mortgage Association, the General Services Administration, and several federal officials sued in their official roles. The District says the move violates the Residence Act of 1790, which requires federal offices tied to the seat of government to operate in Washington unless Congress expressly allows otherwise. According to the filing, HUD's founding statute carries the same requirement, and Ginnie Mae's directs it to keep its principal office in the District.
The central allegation is straightforward. The District says Congress never authorized the move, so the agencies had no legal basis to make it.
The filing lays out the following account. HUD had been headquartered at the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, near L'Enfant Plaza, since 1968. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In June 2025, the agencies announced HUD would move to 2415 Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia, a building completed in 2017 that had housed the National Science Foundation. By the time the suit was filed, more than 80% of HUD's roughly 2,700 headquarters employees had been reassigned to Alexandria, according to the filing, and most Ginnie Mae employees had been relocated as well.
Cost runs through the dispute. HUD and GSA said keeping the Weaver Building would require "nearly half a billion dollars over the next four years to meet minimum federal standards." The District says that figure is contradicted by GSA and HUD's own 2024 analysis, which put the necessary repairs at $21.7 million and found "no feasible alternatives" to making them. The filing also says HUD reportedly paid more than $26 million to move the National Science Foundation out of the Alexandria building to make room.
The District also claims a local financial hit. It says it expects to lose nearly $2 million a year in sales tax revenue once roughly 2,700 HUD workers stop spending in its Southwest quadrant.
Beyond the location question, the suit raises two process claims. The District says the agencies never carried out the environmental review that federal law requires before a major move, skipping any study of how shifting thousands of commuters from a transit-served downtown to a car-dependent suburb would affect traffic and air quality. It also says the agencies were required to favor historic buildings and instead left a historic property in a historic district for a suburban office that qualifies as neither.
The filing quotes officials who backed the move. Virginia's then-governor is quoted saying, "It's not every day - in fact, I don't think it's been ever - that a federal, cabinet-level agency has moved its headquarters to Virginia." A GSA official is quoted describing it as "the first major agency headquarters relocation in the Trump Administration's effort to right-size our federal real estate portfolio."
The District is asking the court to declare the relocation unlawful, vacate the decisions behind it, and order HUD and Ginnie Mae to keep their headquarters in Washington.
These are allegations that have not been tested in court, and no judge has ruled on any of the claims.
