SEC headquarters will stay at One Penn Center after DOGE threat
The agency has renewed its Center City office lease for another 10 years.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will stay in Philadelphia’s One Penn Center.
Six months after SEC employees were told that their regional headquarters at 1617 John F. Kennedy Blvd. would be shuttered as part of President Donald Trump’s cutbacks to federal spending, the General Services Administration has instead renewed a full 10-year, fixed-term lease with the building’s owners.
“This is a big win for the SEC, for Philadelphia, and for One Penn Center,” said Henry Gross, whose family owns the building.
The SEC headquarters inhabit 44,765 square feet in the 20-story Art Deco tower, which sits atop SEPTA’s Suburban Station. The offices, where roughly 150 government employees work, have been located there since 2014.
The previous lease was $1.2 million a year, which Gross describes as below market rate, and the new one will extend those terms. With the SEC‘s renewal, One Penn Center is 88% occupied with a few forthcoming leaves in the pipeline. Gross says a small 4,000-square-foot office for the International Trade Administration may still be cut.
Prior to Trump’s inauguration in January, the SEC had planned to remain in One Penn Center. In 2024, the agency requested renovations from the building owners, who complied with a $500,000 renovation in the summer and fall of that year.
That’s why employees and owners were surprised when the lease was slated for termination along with SEC headquarters leases in other major cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago.
“The General Services Administration (GSA) reached an agreement with the landlords for the Los Angeles Regional Office (LARO) and Philadelphia Regional Office (PLRO) for those SEC offices to remain in their current locations,” an SEC spokesperson said in an email. “The LARO lease is set to expire in September 2029 and the PLRO lease is set to expire in August 2035.”
The cutbacks were part of a savings campaign launched by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which sought to save $2 trillion in federal spending.
Two dozen federal building leases were included in the March list for cancellation in Pennsylvania and 14 in New Jersey. Six of those were in Philadelphia, including the SEC headquarters.
It is not clear if other federal leases slated for cancellation in March were renewed.
Another Philadelphia federal office slated for closure was a 42,995-square-foot space for the Department of Education (DOE) in the Wanamaker Building, which is being rehabilitated and turned into apartments. Some office space will remain, however, and there are still office tenants in the largely vacant building. The future of the DOE remains unclear.
GSA did not immediately respond to The Inquirer’s request for comment.
A previous version of this story misidentified a tenant as the International Trade Commission. It is the International Trade Administration.