Report: $16M not enough to address federal office vacancies
Federal agencies have spent $16 million since January 2025 to assess how office buildings are being used across the government, but a new report said it does not do enough.
The federal government spends approximately $7 billion annually on office spaces, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The government spent approximately $5 billion to lease office space and $2 billion a year to operate and maintain office buildings.
The Government Accountability Office analyzed the implementation of the 2025 Utilizing Space Efficiently and Improving Technologies Act, legislation set to monitor how federal agencies manage office space across the government. The General Services Administration, a federal agency that oversees government infrastructure, required agencies to analyze timecard entries, daily check-in surveys, badging and visual inspections to determine how often federal employees used offices.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture accounted for $9 million in costs associated with the program’s implementation due to badge scanner upgrades throughout the agency. However, not all agencies across the government used data in the same way due to discrepancies in reporting.
Demian Brady, vice president of research at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, said costs associated with the program should be seen as an investment to lower taxpayer bills on future federal office properties.
“If we’re spending this money to better track the comings and goings of federal employees, we should be able to put this data to good use and figure out where the federal government has office space that could be unloaded,” Brady told The Center Square.
The GAO found the Department of the Interior only reported on how many employees were assigned to a particular office, not whether they showed up for work. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security did not report occupancy data for nearly 700 agency spaces under the USE IT Act due to limited badging technology.
“There was some inconsistency in terms of how agencies interpreted the guidance, what they counted as typical office space and what they didn’t,” David Merroni, director of physical infrastructure at the GAO, told The Center Square.
Merroni said the GSA interpreted the USE IT Act in a way that excluded some vacant office spaces within tenant buildings. The GAO found that the GSA did not include certain vacant office spaces it managed in its report.
“Buildings that GSA was reporting on, particularly these multi-tenant facilities where many agencies are essentially renting space, that in those cases GSA wasn’t reporting vacant space, and so that’s not captured in the data that’s out there right now,” Merroni told The Center Square.
The GAO called on the GSA to report data on all occupied office buildings, clarify whether office spaces meet or exceed the USE IT Act’s 60% utilization threshold, reevaluate reporting guidelines, and develop a plan to improve the program’s future efficiency.
Merroni said that implementing the GAO’s recommendations would likely lower costs over time, resulting in greater taxpayer savings as the government improves efficiency. He estimated that the government’s $16 million cost of analyzing occupancy would decrease once efficient mechanisms were implemented.
“Agencies really should move forward now to get rid of clearly underused properties, where it’s not a matter of ‘Is the data 5% off?’ But it’s clear this property is highly underused; there’s no clear plan to use it anytime in the near future,” Merroni told The Center Square. “Agencies should move forward now with the data they have to make decisions and reduce the footprint to make for a more efficient government and ultimately save taxpayer dollars.”
The GAO found that agencies planned to cut office space contracts and deals following the report’s findings. GSA officials reported plans to cut 40,000 square feet of office space from one of its leases in Kansas City. The Department of Energy planned to cut seven leases, estimating $1.6 million in savings and the Department of Homeland Security reported 15 space reduction projects valued to save $350 million over the next 20 years.
Brady said the best way for the government to save money is to make specific cuts in federal programs and agency actions. He pointed to unsuccessful efforts in 2016 to establish a public buildings reform board that affected perceived success for future programs.
Congress failed to provide appropriations for the board over the last three years, The Center Square reported.
“It had some specific rounds of sell-offs of federal property, but it wasn’t quite as successful,” Brady told The Center Square. “It’s not as easy to do as you might think.”
He said a program in which federal agencies could retain a portion of the proceeds from selling federal office space could incentivize greater taxpayer savings.
“They can offset other costs that the agency has while also making sure that we’re able to have some good savings for taxpayers as well,” Brady said. “That gives them a stake in reviewing, analyzing, processing, and disposing of these unneeded excess properties.”
Brady called for an extensive review and coordination across federal government branches to reduce costs and save taxpayer dollars.
“We have a $40 trillion debt, so everything has to be on the table. Some people will say, ‘Well, it’s just a few million dollars,’ but it all adds up to $7 trillion in annual spending and about $2 trillion in annual debt,” Brady told The Center Square. “We got to find ways to pare back the federal government wherever we can.”
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