Musk ramps up DOGE as Tesla stock tanks, backlash grows
Tesla’s stock dropped about 15% on March 10. Still, CEO Elon Musk has no plans to slow down his work in the U.S. government.
- The Department of Government Efficiency has reversed its decision to close the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas in Corpus Christi.
- The closure was initially part of a plan to reduce federal spending by canceling or renegotiating real estate contracts.
The Department of Government Efficiency no longer plans to close the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas in downtown Corpus Christi.
Last month, DOGE announced that it would be ending the lease on the attorney’s office at 800 N. Shoreline Blvd., Suite 500, in the One Shoreline Plaza South Tower, listing it among about 800 other agencies across the country whose real estate contracts and leases would be canceled or renegotiated as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce federal spending.
The 17,039-square-foot office costs the federal government $409,689 a year, according to the DOGE website.
Closure would have saved the federal government $307,267 a year, it said.
Matt Cravey, president of Cravey Real Estate Services Inc., the leasing company for One Shoreline Boulevard, said that the original lease is in effect and the cancellation has been rescinded.
“It’s good news,” he said. “It’s not surprising to us. It just didn’t make sense to us to be canceling that office.”
The U.S. General Services Administration, which leases and manages commercial real estate and constructs, manages and preserves government buildings, sent the original memo to the property owners alerting them that the lease would be terminated, he said.
However, within a week of receiving that notice, they got another memo telling them to disregard the first notice, he said.
“GSA is reviewing all options to optimize our footprint and building utilization,” read a statement provided by a spokesperson for the General Services Administration Greater Southwest Region, which oversees offices in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. “A component of our space consolidation plan will be the termination of many soft term leases.
“To the extent these terminations affect public facing facilities and/or existing tenants, we are working with our agency partners to secure suitable alternative space,” it said.
The lease termination would have had a trickle-down effect, Cravey said, affecting anyone who served the agency, including the building’s owner and lender.
Additional office closures or lease terminations could have far-reaching effects for any service provider of the federal government, he said.
“I think anybody that’s a supplier to the federal government needs to be on their toes and be prepared for any repercussions from this,” he said, adding that the new administration did not give advance notice that the lease would be canceled, putting people on edge about the possibility of losing their positions and offices.
The Southern District of Texas comprises seven divisions with federal district courts in Houston, Galveston, Victoria, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, McAllen and Laredo. The closure would have impacted the district’s ability to prosecute federal criminal cases.
With a staff of more than 200 attorneys representing an estimated 9 million people in 43 countries and covering 44,000 square miles from Houston to the Mexico border, the district is among the busiest in the country, according to the website.
First staffed in 1975, the Corpus Christi Division is composed of Aransas, Bee, Brooks, Duval, Jim Wells, Kenedy, Kleberg, Live Oak, Nueces and San Patricio counties and includes a population of more than 555,000.
DOGE also announced closures of U.S. attorney’s offices in Lufkin, Texas; Toledo, Ohio; Muskogee, Oklahoma; and Sioux City, Iowa.
No other federal agencies in Corpus Christi appear to have been affected by the DOGE cancellations, based on the website information.
“It means something for a lot of people, that everybody still has their jobs,” Cravey said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas did not provide comment Thursday on the cancellation of the lease termination.
