Brother of Trump's GSA leader tried to buy prime federal property

Source: Washington Post

Investigations
Brother of Trump's GSA leader tried to buy prime federal property
The proposal to buy a parcel in Silicon Valley prompted a complaint to the inspector general. The GSA says it rejected the offer and its acting administrator followed ethics rules.

March 13, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
By Jonathan O'Connell

Jonathan O'Connell is an investigative reporter. Reach him with tips on Signal at jonathanoc.76 or via email at jonathan.oconnell@washpost.com.

In January, President Donald Trump appointed former tech executive Stephen Ehikian as acting administrator of the General Services Administration, the federal agency that manages government buildings, supplies and services. ... Two weeks later, Ehikian's brother sent the agency's real estate staff an unusual request.

Brad Ehikian, a Bay Area real estate developer, proposed in the Feb. 3 message that the GSA sell his company a federally owned 17-acre campus in the heart of Silicon Valley for $65 million, according to agency records obtained by The Washington Post. The GSA tried to auction the property in 2022 for nearly twice that amount and in late February said it will try again to sell it at auction, this time for a minimum of $85 million.

Current and former GSA officials told The Post that developers sometimes submit unsolicited offers to buy property owned by the U.S. government. But they said they had not encountered such a proposal from someone related to the GSA administrator. ... "I've just never seen that from a family member before," said former senior GSA official Anthony Costa, a career civil servant who spent more than three decades at the agency, much of that time working closely with GSA leadership including in the division responsible for selling real estate.

Brad Ehikian's proposal prompted an anonymous complaint to the GSA inspector general's office alleging that the brother of the agency's leader was trying to buy a federal property in the Bay Area at below-market value, records show. ... The GSA declined the offer, according to documents gathered by the inspector general's office. According to federal real estate experts, the agency is legally bound to sell most properties through competitive bidding and to obtain fair market value for them, a requirement that holds even as the Trump administration mounts an aggressive push to reduce federal real estate holdings.

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Alice Crites, Aaron Schaffer and Monique Woo contributed to this report.

By Jonathan O'Connell
Jonathan O'Connell is a reporter focused on investigations. He has covered economic development, commercial real estate and President Donald Trump's business. He joined The Post in 2010.follow on X@jocwapo

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/03/13/gsa-administrator-brother-property-menlo-park/