Why claims that DOGE ended a lease on Obama’s Chicago presidential library are misleading

Is the Department of Government Efficiency ending the lease for former President Barack Obama’s presidential library? Social media posts would have you believe that, but that’s misleading.

DOGE is the Trump administration’s cost-cutting agency, headed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. President Donald Trump created the agency in January by executive order. 

In a section detailing lease terminations, DOGE listed a 73,573 square foot building in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, leased by the National Archives and Records Administration. The lease was for $1,480,913, and DOGE said that terminating it resulted in a savings of $740,457.

"JUST IN: Elon Musk and DOGE have TERMINATED the lease on the Obama Presidential Library site in Chicago, per Fox. Barry’s gonna be BIG mad," conservative commentator Nick Sortor wrote in a March 5 X post, using a derogatory nickname for Obama.  

We found other social media posts from Trump supporters praising the move, and opposing views from Obama supporters. An X post by RT, a news site funded by the Russian government and formerly known as Russia Today, said "Elon Musk-led DOGE ENDS lease at Obama Presidential Library's Chicago site. … Site expected to be shut later this year, moved to new location."

But the posts are misleading. The lease’s cancellation doesn’t affect the privately built Obama Presidential Center, which is still under construction in Chicago. NARA, which handles Obama’s digital library and stores items at the Hoffman Estates building, was making plans in August 2024 to leave that building, before DOGE even existed. And it’s unclear how much, if anything, the government will save by ending the lease.

Here’s what we know about DOGE and the Illinois lease.

The building in question is a former furniture showroom in a suburb about 35 miles northwest of Chicago. NARA has leased it since 2016 to store records for its Barack Obama Presidential Library.

The site was always planned to be a temporary holding site for Obama’s materials. Gowns former first lady Michelle Obama wore at inaugural ceremonies, gifts given by heads of state and portraits of Barack Obama and the family’s dogs, Bo and Sunny, are among the physical items NARA holds there, which can be viewed digitally on NARA’s all-digital Barack Obama Presidential Library website.

NARA said in August 2024  that it would end operations there in late 2025 and move the building’s contents to permanent storage in College Park, Maryland. 

The lease was set to expire near the end of 2025, and it’s unclear whether DOGE ended the lease early. Based on the DOGE website figures, $740,457 is half of the annual lease, meaning the lease would need to end six months early to achieve those savings.

But Bob Huber, vice president of investment sales at Imperial Realty Co., which handles the property’s leasing, told PolitiFact in an interview that the federal government would be responsible for paying rent on the remainder of the lease if it left the property early, unless another tenant was secured. The site is currently listed for lease or sale, Huber said.

The White House and NARA did not respond to our request for clarity. A spokesperson for the General Services Administration which handles federal leases, did not answer specific questions about the lease.

Huber said that the lease already was set to end this fall.

Huber said that as of March 7, the General Services Administration hadn’t contacted Imperial Realty Co. about ending the lease. NARA has not left the building, he said.

"We haven’t heard a word from the GSA, only the posting on DOGE. We concluded they might leave early if we had a serious buyer/tenant ready to go and agreed to end the lease early," Huber wrote in an email.

NARA runs an Obama digital presidential library that is separate from the physical Obama Presidential Center, a privately run 19-acre campus with a museum under construction that’s set to open on Chicago’s South Side in 2026. The Obama center is unaffected by the Hoffman Estates lease. 

That’s because The Obama Foundation in 2017 decided on a different model than other presidential libraries. It chose not to build a library for NARA to house the former president’s records. The Chicago center is privately owned and operated, and doesn’t rely on federal money.

NARA’s website says the Obama library it maintains is the first fully digital presidential library of the 16 it oversees (people can search a digital database on NARA’s Obama Library website). NARA said 95% of Obama's records, such as photos, videos and emails, originated in digital form, but it also physically stores artifacts and about 30 million pages of unclassified paper records.

NARA will digitize, store and preserve all Obama’s records and artifacts at a secure facility (currently Hoffman Estates but eventually in Maryland) and retain legal custody of them. The agency will not have a physical presence at the Chicago center, but will work with the Obama Foundation to loan the center records and artifacts for display, NARA and the Obama Center said.