Sen. Joni Ernst is calling for the government to pull the plug on the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco after its public spaces turned into a crime-ravaged open-air drug market that is so unsafe that government employees were ordered to work from home.
The building was designed to be groundbreaking in its openness to the public, but it has become a monument to government bungling and the decay plaguing many American cities.
Ms. Ernst, Iowa Republican, described the scene at the building as something out of a post-apocalyptic horror movie, with muggings common, occasional gunfire, and nearly 150 drug overdoses and 33 deaths reported on the block surrounding the building in the first half of this year.
Run by the General Services Administration, the federal government’s chief landlord agency, it leases space to a half-dozen branches, including the Department of Health and Human Services, which ordered employees this summer to work from home rather than risk their lives going to the building.
Ms. Ernst says it’s time the remaining federal workers in the building leave.
“With at least five other federal facilities within the San Francisco area where taxpayers and government employees could interact face to face without fearing for their lives, I am calling for the offices and workers within the Speaker Pelosi Federal Building to be relocated and the building shut down until it is no longer a threat to public safety,” Ms. Ernst said Wednesday.
The 18-story building opened in 2007 and was supposed to be a “model for civic sustainability.” The architect said that meant an attempt to be particularly eco-conscious, with a “democratic layout” for employees and a particular focus on letting the public have access via a large plaza.
In 2019, GSA announced that the plaza had failed “due to complex social issues,” and it began a redesign that was supposed to make the plaza more safe and secure — or, in the words of GSA, make it capture “the aspirations of the federal government and citizens of San Francisco.”
Those citizens now regularly step across “bloody sidewalks” and “human feces” to get into the building, The San Francisco Standard reported last month.
“Sometimes I come home and cry after seeing what I see,” an employee told the outlet, adding that people stopped bothering to report crimes to the police because, The Standard said, “nothing was done when they reported similar incidents in the past.”
The Standard cited fire department figures that showed 33 overdose deaths from January through June at the intersection of Mission and Seventh streets.
Erecting the fence was a particularly striking decision, given the symbolism of the idea and its association with former President Donald Trump’s campaign to build a border wall.
At the Pelosi building, a chain-link fence seals off access to concrete benches around the building. Drug dealers had claimed the benches as their territory.
The Washington Times has reached out to GSA for comment for this report.
Ms. Ernst, in a letter to GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan, demanded to know how many federal employees are supposed to work in the building and how many are showing up daily. She also asked for the latest risk assessments for the plaza, which the senator said has become an embarrassment.
“According to its designer, the building was set up to represent ‘the way government should be and how the workplace should be.’ Ironically, the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is instead a symbol of the way government doesn’t work, with offices and workplaces largely empty due to drug and crime problems resulting from the misguided policies of the state and city governments,” Ms. Ernst said.
The senator from Iowa named the Pelosi Building the winner of her “Squeal Award,” a designation she doles out every month to an example of the government’s buffoonery. The name of the award comes from a 2014 campaign ad she produced talking about growing up castrating pigs on an Iowa farm and how she would go to Washington to make the city’s big spenders “squeal.”
The building opened in 2007, two years behind schedule. At the time, it was known as the San Francisco Federal Building.
Congress added Mrs. Pelosi’s name late last year as a parting gift when she relinquished her post as speaker of the House.
Mrs. Pelosi has office space in the building.
A spokesman said Mrs. Pelosi voiced concerns about safety around the building in a meeting with the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California.
The U.S. attorney also has offices in the building, as does HHS and the Labor Department, Agriculture Department, Transportation Department and the Social Security Administration.
Although some federal employees are not showing up, protesters are. A large number of demonstrators descended on the building last week to denounce Israel and demand that the U.S. try to stop its ally’s response to Hamas’ sneak attack.
Protesters padlocked doors to protest Mrs. Pelosi, whom they accused of being too supportive of Israel.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.