A federal pharmaceutical testing facility in St. Louis will remain open, despite appearing on President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency’s list of scheduled office closures, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Employees at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration testing facility at 645 S. Newstead Ave. in the Central West End, known as the Office of Testing and Research for the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), were told by supervisors Wednesday that the facility would remain open despite it appearing on a list of office closures published Monday by Trump’s DOGE advisory body , said a person familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution.

Representatives of the FDA and the U.S. Department of Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but separately confirmed to the Regulatory Affairs Professional Society , a Maryland-based trade association, that the St. Louis testing facility would remain open.

The 50,000-square-foot office is still listed as a closure on the DOGE website, with the advisory body saying it would result in $2.5 million in annual savings, or an estimated $20 million over five years.

The CDER “performs an essential public health task by making sure that safe and effective drugs are available to improve the health of the people of the United States,” according to the FDA website.

The St. Louis lab contains testing equipment worth “hundreds of millions” of dollars, biotech publication Endpoints News reported . In 2008, scientists at the lab identified contaminated supplies of the blood thinner Heparin that had likely killed dozens of Americans, and in 2020, the lab found unsafe levels of a carcinogen that led to the drug Zantac being recalled from the market, Endpoints reported.

About 75 scientists work at the lab, the source familiar with the matter said. They work in person and were taken by surprise Monday with the news that the lab would close, and also fear further FDA cuts, chemists told St. Louis Public Radio . After news broke Monday of the possible closure, a former top FDA official, Howard Sklamberg, told KMOV that the St. Louis testing facility is the FDA’s flagship laboratory for pharmaceutical testing and its “most important pharmaceutical lab in the country” due to its after-market testing of medications.

Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf told RAPS that a closure of the laboratory “could easily lead to a regrettable direct impact and serious harm to unsuspecting and vulnerable patients.”

At one point, the laboratory and office received a $10 million renovation designed by Chiodini Architects, the firm said on its website. The building contains 23 labs, according to that overview of the renovation.

The FDA-leased building is owned by an entity tied with CBRE Group of Richmond, Virginia, and Richmond, Virginia-based Boyd Watterson Asset Management. CBRE declined to comment on the office or the status of the lease, and a representative of Boyd Watterson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. Rep. Wesley Bell, a Democrat who represents the city of St. Louis and part of St. Louis County and took office in January, described the potential closure of the FDA facility as "reckless."

"This lab ensures our medications are safe, identifying contaminants that could cause serious harm," Bell said in a prepared statement. "They are simply shutting it down to satisfy a billionaire who thinks he knows better than the American people. There is no justification for this move, and the consequences will be real. The administration must reverse course before people get hurt.”

Around 30 other FDA field offices around the country were listed on the DOGE website to be closed. The Center for Drug Evaluation and Research was one of five St. Louis offices for which DOGE said it would close and cancel leases. A separate list published by the federal agency that manages real estate, the General Services Administration, identified four St. Louis federally owned properties that could be closed and sold , including the nearly 1 million-square-foot Robert A. Young Federal Building downtown, two other federal buildings and a park at the Thomas F. Eagleton Courthouse downtown.

Whether all those owned or leased offices will be closed and leases canceled remains to be seen: The landlord of one of those federal offices, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service office located at the University Tower office building in Richmond Heights, said the lease could not be legally terminated for years despite appearing on DOGE's list of cancellations. That echoed the experiences of landlords nationwide who said they had been contacted by federal officials to exit leases that could not yet be canceled .