Earlier this afternoon I told you how the GSA staffers who run the Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse in Phoenix were abruptly fired with no warning or notification to anyone who works in the building. A bit later this afternoon I was able to speak to Debra Lucas, the District Court Executive and Clerk of the Court. To explain that job title Lucas is the senior judicial branch official at the courthouse in terms of the administration of the function of the courthouse. What Lucas told me basically squared with what sources had already told and which I shared with you in that earlier post.
They got no advance warning that this was going to happen. And they still haven’t gotten any explanation of what’s happening. “We’re still waiting for guidance,” Lucas told me. When I asked, guidance from whom? she said the GSA.
As she further explained, the building has one contract for facility maintenance and another for cleaning. And for now those people are still showing up. So for now, not a lot has changed in terms of like trash piling up or like something falling apart. It’s just that the people in charge of the building and who the contractors report to are gone. I tried to suss out, like is this sustainable? Her response was pretty much identical to what I heard from the person I spoke to in the GSA field office in Phoenix. Lucas took a moment and said, “It’s too early to say.”
They’re two and half days in.
In other words, what it comes down to is that the GSA, at DOGE’s orders, have essentially abandoned this facility. It’s a courthouse. So they’re continuing to do judge stuff. And the people who clean the toilets and maintain the AC and so forth are continuing to showed up yesterday and today because that’s what they do. But no one has any idea what’s going on and that’s really it.
I get the impression that they’re trying to stay generally quiet about this. Probably because no one wants to antagonize DOGE but also because they genuinely have no idea what’s going on. I mean, think how bizarre this is. Courthouses aren’t really a very kinetic kind of real estate space. The government sets them up and that’s kind of it. And here you have a case where you work in this building and suddenly the people who are the closest analogue to the landlord or the management company just disappeared. That’s weird!
I suspect it’s pretty outside the experience of all these people.
My strong sense, based both on logic and hunches but also reporting I’m doing, is that stuff like this is happening all across the country right now. But we’re simply not hearing about because it’s happening so quickly and in so many places at once.
