BUREAUCRACY : Republicans Move to Close 2 Buildings Used by Congress

The Republican “less is better” revolution now has GOP lawmakers looking to put some of their new home up for sale. Republicans say they will sell off one of five House of Representatives office buildings and terminate the lease of one of the House’s two warehouses.

“There’s no need for as much space in a slimmed-down Congress as there was in the bloated bureaucracy of the old Congress,” said Rep. Robert D. Franks (R-N.J.), a member of the GOP transition team put in place after the November elections thrust the party to majority control of the House and Senate. The team is conducting a survey of office space.

The two buildings that are candidates for closing, House Republicans say, are House Annex No. 1, named for the late House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill (D-Mass.), and House Annex No. 2, named for former President Gerald R. Ford, who also served as a House minority leader.

While many Capitol Hill visitors are familiar with the stately Rayburn, Cannon and Longworth House office buildings because they contain the offices of lawmakers, no members are housed at the Ford or O’Neill structures and they are little-known outside Washington.

Ford is home to many of the congressional caucuses, such as the Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus, which both face the loss of public funding if the Republicans have their way. It also houses congressional subcommittees, some of which are on the GOP chopping block for 1995.

The seven-story, two-wing Ford building is a fortress compared to the smaller and frailer, but more centrally located O’Neill. The latter was converted from a hotel in 1972.

While the proposed Republican cuts would empty much of the Ford building, closing it wouldn’t be that easy. The Ford also houses the Congressional Budget Office, the House computer systems headquarters and the printing and documents storage room.

It also wouldn’t be cheap. Franks said it would cost $3 million to move computer hardware out of the building.

The concrete-and-brick building is a five-minute walk from the Rayburn House Office Building, far from the path beaten by tourists. But many who work there find the space convenient and practical. Some fear that closing the building may throw office structures into disarray, spreading departments among several floors in a less spacious building.

The Congressional Budget Office sits near the top of the building on the sixth floor. “Having the CBO on one floor has allowed us to operate much more effectively than if it was on separate floors,” said CBO Director Robert D. Reischauer. “People run into each other, and know each other by first names.”

The Ford building was constructed in 1939, designed originally to hold the FBI’s fingerprint division. The concrete floors, which can hold up to 250 pounds per square foot, were created to accommodate heavy file cabinets. The building began a long renovation process when the House took it over in the mid-1970s. To date, renovations have totaled $30 million, including a new fiber-optic telecommunications system.

Conversely, the O’Neill building is not as beefy. Erected as a hotel in 1947 , it was designed with a maximum floor load of only 40 pounds per square foot.

File cabinets higher than two drawers are not permitted. However, one staff member of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment confessed “everyone violates that.”

As another cost-cutting measure, the Republicans are looking into terminating the lease of one of its warehouses. The House presently leases the old Washington Star newspaper warehouse, which costs taxpayers about $215,000 per year.

The other storage space is the P Street Warehouse, which costs $504,000 per year. Franks said old materials in both warehouses are piling up. He points, as an example, to the 25,900 copies of the 1988 Agricultural Yearbook sitting in storage, unclaimed.