The U.S. government has too much office space

The United States federal government has an enormous glut of unused office space on its hands.

The Government Accountability Office found that 17 of the 24 federal agencies it sampled were using an estimated 25 percent of their headquarters, Facilities Dive reported.

In one case, the GAO found that only 67 percent of one agency’s office space would be used, even if all of its employees came into the office.

That’s “not a sustainable or fiscally responsible way to manage our federal real estate,” Sen. Tom Carper said during a Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing on the matter last month.

The General Services Administration manages more than 360 million square feet of office space across 8,000 buildings.

“Each year, it costs billions of taxpayer dollars to operate and maintain these federal buildings, regardless of their utilization. This is simply unacceptable,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said during the hearing.

Along with being a waste of money, it’s also a waste of energy, she said.

“Committees have done a lot of legislative work to support policies that will reduce emissions. I would be interested to know the emissions associated with heating and cooling these buildings that are unoccupied,” she said.

The bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided funding that is supposed to be used to make government buildings more energy efficient and resilient to climate change. 

At least some of the government’s office buildings are completely empty, Public Buildings Service Commissioner Nina Albert testified.

“We hardly have any buildings unoccupied. We have buildings that are underutilized, but buildings that are unoccupied usually move to the disposition list,” she said.

Federal agencies need to identify their current and future office needs so the government can determine where to invest and where to divest from its real estate, Capito said.

The agencies need to be given “benchmarks” to determine their office space needs, David Marroni, acting director of physical infrastructure at the GAO told the senators.

More than half of the leases that the GSA manages are set to expire by 2027, providing an opportunity to offload some unneeded space.

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