The federal government seems incapable of managing anything well, so it can be no surprise that it is incompetent when it tries to manage office space. Even so, a report this month from the Government Accountability Office is startling and ought to spur real reforms.
The GAO says federal agencies spend $7 billion a year to maintain federal office buildings of 511 million square feet of space, or to lease office space from others. Yet much of this office space stands empty. “Seventeen of the 24 federal agencies in GAO's review used an estimated average 25 percent or less of their headquarters buildings' capacity,” reported GAO. Even those agencies that were most efficient left between 51% and 61% of their space unused.
GAO CONCERNED ABOUT ‘FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT WEAKNESSES’
This costs taxpayers directly and, probably, indirectly involves much unnecessary energy consumption, amongst other things. Likely indirect costs not specifically discussed by the GAO, but inferable from its report include those stemming from a workforce so spread out that there is no “eyeball accountability,” meaning workers can slack off without anyone noticing. This means wasteful spending and poor service are additional costs of a workforce already enjoying so many civil service protections that good managers find it impossible to fire even the worst and most deadbeat among them.
The GAO also reports that “underutilized federal office space involves opportunity costs…, In the local economy, unneeded federal properties and land could be put to productive use…. selling a federal building to the private sector increases the local tax base, as federal buildings are generally exempt from local taxes.”
Part of the problem, the GAO says, is longstanding mismanagement that long preceded telecommuting: “We calculated that for one of the headquarters…, that if all assigned staff entered the building on a single day, it would still only use 67% of....capacity.” The problem got monumentally worse when agencies began allowing off-site work during the pandemic. Now, with the pandemic over, “all 24 agencies said that their in-office workforce has not returned to pre-pandemic levels due to increased use of telework and remote work.”
The Federal Property Management Reform Act of 2016 was supposed fix this problem by fording the federal government to cut unused space. But the last has been ignored. The solutions should be two-fold. First, all agencies should reduce remote work so workers return for several days a week, which encourages esprit de corps and lets supervisors supervise. With staffs on site, it will be easier to figure how much space is needed, and how much can be consolidated and relinquished.
Second, underutilized buildings should be sold, workforces moved into unused spaces in other buildings, and leases canceled a rented spaces. Congress should downsize the bloated federal bureaucracy anyway, making even less office space necessary. The nation’s beleaguered taxpayers would welcome this.