OPINION:
The government isn’t working in Washington. That’s not an opinion; that’s a fact confirmed in a new Government Accountability Office study of the utilization of federal buildings that revealed a majority of federal employees haven’t been showing up to their place of work.
The audit revealed the majority of federal buildings are underused, largely because the people in charge of the federal workforce have not reined in telecommuting now that the pandemic-era lockdowns are behind us.
But that’s not the only reason. Mismanagement of federal office space is rampant, according to GAO’s findings. Estimates are that the federal government owns 500 million square feet of office space, but there could be more. Nobody knows for sure.
It costs about $2 billion a year to maintain and operate the known, owned space. Add to that the space that’s leased, and the number rises to more than $7 billion.
That’s a mighty sum for space that’s barely being used. The July 2023 interim report from GAO determined that 17 of the 24 agencies included in its review were using less than one-quarter of their headquarters’ building capacity.
“On the higher range,” the report explained, “agencies used an estimated 39 to 49% of the capacity of their headquarters on average.”
As the nation faces a spending crisis and total federal indebtedness continues to soar, more than half of some of the most expensive and desirable real estate in America is going unused. The issue with that is, employees who live in the Washington metropolitan area get a pay bump within the general schedule, and it costs significantly more to live here than in Butte, Montana, Gastonia, North Carolina, or Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons more government jobs are being filled than in other sectors of the economy. As the Committee to Unleash Prosperity recently noted in its daily Hotline, in the first half of 2023, the government workforce at all levels grew by 380,000 new hires — which is not just more hires than in any other sector, it’s “more than mining, manufacturing, construction, wholesale, and transportation” combined.
Despite the surplus of federal building space in Washington the FBI plans to vacate the J. Edgar Hoover headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue in favor of a palatial new complex in Northern Virginia. This may not happen, as House Republicans have expressed a desire to block America’s top cops from expanding their real estate empire.
They have a point. If telecommuting is here to stay, federal agencies no longer need to maintain a pricey Beltway address. As long as employees of agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the National Technical Information Service or the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are attending Zoom meetings, it makes no difference whether they live in Arlington, Virginia, or Arlington, Texas.
Moving the headquarters of these agencies to more modest quarters in Iowa or southern Illinois or Nebraska, where the cost of living is far lower, would yield massive savings in terms of real estate and salary costs. Congress ought to review GAO’s findings and ensure American taxpayers do not continue paying billions for nothing.
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