UPDATE, March 5: Less than a day later, all 443 properties had been pulled from the site. Bloomberg News notes that one of the properties mentioned was "a northern Virginia campus that doesn’t appear in federal property records but has long been associated with the Central Intelligence Agency." The Trump administration continues to refuse to comment, either on the notice or the retraction.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He put more than 443 federal properties, some of them irreplaceable, on the market.

Today, the General Services Administration put 443 federal properties up for sale, including the Washington headquarters of the FBI and the Department of Justice, but also other purpose-built facilities across the country. They range from enormous office buildings to specialized facilities like a functionally irreplaceable nuclear waste treatment plant. 

It's not clear how much money the properties could raise, assuming they could be sold at all, but it's telling that the Trump administration cited "$430 million in [annual] operating costs." This is not a lot of money: the federal government takes in that much revenue about every 51 minutes.

Neither Trump nor anyone in his administration has offered any explanation for the move, to include where the employees who use those buildings would go. The Trump administration's return-to-office mandate has already produced some absurd results, with workers hired remotely "returning" to offices with no desks or electricity, and in some cases, no office left to return to.

If there is a plan, it's most likely that Trump intends to enter into a leaseback scheme, where private investors buy the buildings at pennies on the dollar and then lease them back to the federal government. This would, in effect, turn buildings that were costing the federal government nothing into a giant perpetual drain on the federal budget.

It's common for struggling, cash-poor businesses to enter into this kind of arrangement as a way to create cash flow and stave off bankruptcy. Troubled restaurant chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden, and the now-bankrupt Sears chain of department stores are familiar examples. That logic doesn't apply to the federal government.

This isn't the first time that Trump, who has owned many buildings but made money on very few of them, has used government real estate for his own profit. In 2012, the General Services Administration approved a plan to relocate the FBI to new custom facility while turning the site of the current J. Edgar Hoover Building into newly-built mixed commercial and residential space. But that would have brought competition to what was then the Trump International Hotel—which occupied the Old Post Office Building, of which Trump was simultaneously the tenant and landlord. Trump personally intervened to kill the project.

Why does this matter?

• One way to make government more "efficient" is to not hold a fire sale for the buildings where government employees work.

• A president who was familiar with how real estate markets work would probably try to avoid flooding the market with hundreds of properties all at once, driving down prices.

• It's bad to loot the government for the sake of private interests.

• Accidentally outing your secret CIA facility like this is pretty embarrassing.