The General Services Administration is stepping up plans to offload federal office buildings that its tenant agencies no longer need.

GSA, the federal government’s landlord, announced Wednesday it’s putting eight underutilized federal buildings through its sale and disposal process.

Possible next steps include selling, exchanging, or transferring them to another federal agency, or state or local government, or to the public, “after robust input and engagement with stakeholders.”

The agency expects selling or disposing of these federal buildings would cut 1.5 million square feet from the federal government’s real estate portfolio, and save $475 million in maintenance costs over 10 years.

GSA is adding the following properties to its disposal pipeline:

• Montpelier Federal Building – Montpelier, Vermont
• Brickell Plaza Building – Miami, Florida
• Charles A. Halleck Federal Building – Lafayette, Indiana
• Bismark Federal Building – Bismarck, North Dakota
• James V. Hansen Federal Building – Ogden, Utah
• Gus J. Solomon U.S. Courthouse – Portland, Oregon
• Richard B. Anderson Federal Building – Port Angeles, Washington
• Federal Office Building, 301 7th Street SW – Washington, D.C.

GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said in a statement that GSA’s actions “demonstrate our commitment to accelerating the disposition of federal buildings that don’t use taxpayer dollars effectively.”

GSA is accelerating its sale and disposal efforts, and has been under pressure from Congress to address underutilized federal office space since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agency in November 2023 named nearly two dozen federal properties it planned to offload from its real estate portfolio.

Earlier this year, GSA added another three properties to its disposal pipeline. Those include the Liberty Loan Building in Washington, D.C., which houses the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the Joe L. Evins Federal Building in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where Energy Department employees work; and the multi-agency Peachtree Summit Federal Building in Atlanta.

All told every building currently in GSA’s disposal pipeline adds up to 6 million square feet.

Not counting revenue from any potential sales, GSA estimates the federal government will save nearly $2 billion in maintenance costs over 10 years, once it no longer owns these buildings.

GSA is asking Congress for a $425 million “optimization” fund to help agencies move out of underutilized office space.

Elliot Doomes, commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s transportation and infrastructure subcommittee in July that this funding proposal “would enable GSA to continue improving building utilization rates and provide better services to federal agencies and the community they serve.”

“Although it’s agency by agency, I’ll tell you, the trend is agencies are giving up space. They understand,” Doomes told lawmakers. “We’re bringing our workspace experts to work with these agencies to say, ‘How often are people there? What kind of work do you do? Maybe you don’t need all that space.’ Let’s give some of that space back.”

The Office of Management and Budget expects agencies will shed millions of square feet of building space in the coming years, now that many federal employees are on a hybrid schedule of in-office and work-from-home days.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, as one extreme example, plans to eliminate up to 60% of its total office space footprint by 2038.

OMB, in its report on telework and federal office space utilization, wrote that telework-eligible federal employees are working in their offices about 60% of the time and that a majority of federal employees are not eligible for telework.

Meanwhile, the heads of President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency are calling for all federal employees to return to the office five days a week.

DOGE leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are also focusing their attention on the Public Buildings Reform Board,  a small, independent agency Congress created under the 2016 Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act (FASTA), to help GSA identify federal buildings and properties that agencies no longer need.

As of September 2023, GSA has sold 10 of 12 properties from its “high-value asset” round of recommendations, and received $194 million in proceeds.

But PBRB members of the board say there are plenty more opportunities to sell excess federal real estate.

The board estimates federal building utilization rates in the D.C. metro area remained about 30% lower than pre-pandemic rates.

In fiscal 2022, the 24 largest federal agencies owned nearly a quarter million buildings, covering more than 2.4 billion square feet, according to the latest GSA data.

That portfolio of owned buildings accounts for more than $16 billion in annual costs.

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