President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee much of the federal government’s real estate portfolio is looking to significantly downsize the amount of office space that agencies occupy.

Michael Peters, commissioner of Public Buildings Service within the General Services Administration, said the agency is looking at cutting up to half its total real estate portfolio over the coming years.

“I’m just getting ramped up, but I think our initial review says that number could be up to a 50% reduction on our square footage across the portfolio. We’re not going to do that in six months, but we’re going to try to do this as rapidly as we can,” Peters said Tuesday.

Peters said a “disproportionate amount of that space” would come from the Washington, D.C. metro area — and will include GSA moving out of its own 1800 F St. NW headquarters.

“Timing is not clear, but we want to be a good example, and we should vacate our space and move in with someone else and cohabitate, for lack of a better term, which is something that many people have resisted,” Peters said. “Certainly, there are some agencies that do need their own space for security reasons, but we’re not one of them.

Peters gave these remarks during a public meeting of the Public Buildings Reform Board, a small independent agency tasked with advising GSA on which properties it should sell or dispose of.

GSA has sold most of the properties that the PBRB flagged in its first round of recommendations. But the Office of Management and Budget blocked the board’s second round of recommendations from moving forward. Members of the board are working on their third round of recommendations.

The board’s disposal recommendations include GSA-owned properties across the U.S. During Tuesday’s meeting, members of the board and other real estate experts discussed transforming parts of D.C. dominated by underutilized federal office buildings into residential and retail space.

The list of properties the PBRB has considered for consolidation or disposition includes the headquarters of GSA, the IRS, the Commerce Department, the Department of Health and Human Service, the Office of Personnel Management, the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department and the Forest Service.

Paul Walden, the board’s executive director, stressed the list of properties is not a final list of recommendations, “just the universe of what we’ve analyzed.”

A recent PBRB study, using anonymous cell phone data, estimated that federal headquarters buildings in D.C. operated at 12% of their estimated capacity, on average, between January and September 2023.

Beyond the board’s recommendations, GSA is also accelerating its own plans to dispose of federal buildings that tenant agencies no longer need. Last year, the agency added 6 million square feet of federal office space into its sale and disposal pipeline.

“We need a drastic transition in our portfolio away from owned properties. We’re failing at our mission to deliver space cost-effectively to our customer agencies, and space that they can use to accomplish their missions,” Peters said.

GSA-owned buildings are, on average, over 50 years old, and showing their age. The agency is dealing with a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog.

“If you toured many of them, you wouldn’t want to be there with your dog, much less with your work environment.  They’re falling apart, and that’s not acceptable, and that’s not what we’re about. So we’re committed to changing that. But to do that, we’ve got to downsize the portfolio,” Peters said.

The Trump administration is setting a higher goal for shrinking the federal government’s office space than previous estimates. Former GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan told Federal News Network earlier this month that she expects the agency could shrink its real estate portfolio by 30% and save $60 billion over the next 10 years.

“That’s not going to happen automatically. It’s going to require a lot of work to make sure that we have access to the predictable funding that’s necessary to do this kind of infrastructure work,” Carnahan said.

GSA’s plans to reduce federal office space come as the Trump administration is calling on teleworking federal employees to return to the office full-time.

The Office of Personnel Management gave agencies until the end of the day last Friday to revise their telework policies, and start ordering federal employees to work onsite full-time. OPM is recommending agencies target a 30-day deadline to be in full compliance with the return-to-office directive President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.

Peters acknowledged concerns over whether some agencies will have enough office space to accommodate all their employees on a full-time basis. Some agencies increased staffing in recent years, and renovated their office space to accommodate a hybrid work schedule.

“That’s the $64,000 question, right? It’s how many people are coming back, and when are they coming back. Comprehensive assessment is underway, not just here in the District, but really across the nation to understand where we have deficiencies or where we expect to have deficiencies, and to ascertain how to address them. We don’t have a firm kind of guidance at this point in time, but we recognize that there is a potential problem.”

“There will be more people in spaces than we’ve utilized before, for sure. We will have to adapt, and on a short-term basis, kind of make things work,” he added.

In a recent Federal News Network survey, two-thirds of respondents said they would be either “extremely concerned” or “very concerned” about their agency having enough office space to accommodate a return-to-office mandate.

In some offices, federal employees no longer have assigned desks. instead, they have to reserve workspace ahead of their in-office workdays.

According to the latest data from OMB, 54% of the federal workforce works entirely onsite due to the needs of their jobs.

Telework-eligible federal employees comprise about 46% of the federal workforce, and they are spending an average of 60% of their work hours in person. About 10% of federal employees work entirely remotely.

In addition to shedding GSA-owned office space, Peters said the agency is also in the process of identifying “excess” leased office space.

The Department of Government Efficiency tweeted Monday that GSA recently terminated three leases of “mostly empty office space,” with tenants relocating to nearby buildings in the GSA portfolio.

“With savings of $1.6M, these are the first steps to right size the Federal real estate portfolio of more than 7,500 leases,” DOGE wrote.

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