GSA reexamining data that shows no building is meeting minimum occupy target

None of the federal buildings in a governmentwide database tracking average occupancy rates meet a minimum benchmark that would spare them from consolidation plans for government real estate.

But the General Services Administration, the landlord for many agencies, is taking a closer look at the data that it’s collected so far.

In March, GSA published its first governmentwide snapshot of federal building utilization data.

Under the USE IT Act, which former President Joe Biden signed in his final weeks in office, agencies must demonstrate that their buildings meet at least a 60% utilization rate or develop plans to downsize their office space.

The USE IT Act requires the 24 largest agencies to share building utilization data with GSA.

The data published by GSA doesn’t include the Defense Department, which is one of the largest holders of real estate in the federal government, with over 700,000 facilities worldwide.  It also doesn’t include the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration dismantled last year. 

So far, the data GSA has collected show that none of the 9,700 buildings are meeting the minimum 60% utilization threshold.

But Andrew Heller, acting commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Tuesday that GSA is “not necessarily seeing an apples-to-apples comparison” with the data.

“The USE IT Act was really focused on total space, and so you’re counting things like auditoriums, conference rooms, libraries, spaces where people shouldn’t be reasonably expected to work during a given day,” Heller told the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management.

Heller said the governmentwide Federal Real Property Council that GSA leads, along with the Office of Management and Budget, has created an occupancy working group to review this data and come up with possible recommendations.

The Trump administration has cited underutilized office buildings as justification for selling and consolidating agency headquarters within the D.C. metro area.

The administration has announced plans to sell headquarters buildings for the Agriculture Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The FBI is also moving out of its headquarters building and relocating to the nearby Ronald Reagan Building, which already provides office space for several other agencies.

The Education Department recently announced it will move out of its headquarters, the Lyndon B. Johnson Building, by August and transfer employees to a building that previously held USAID employees.

The Energy Department will move out of its headquarters, the James Forrestal Building, and relocate staff to the Education Department’s headquarters. Heller said that GSA plans to sell the Forrestal Building.

“There’s been a significant amount of improvement on alignment across agencies over the last year, and I think you’re really seeing some of the benefits of that alignment come to fruition now,” he said.

Subcommittee Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said the USE IT Act has provided the kind of data that Congress has sought for years. Since 2020, lawmakers have pushed agencies maintaining largely vacant office buildings to downsize their space.

“Congress has spoken: Agencies must let go of space if they fail to meet that threshold. The last thing we want are excuses, so finding solutions to any hurdles is critical,” Perry said.

Tim Hutchens, executive vice president for CBRE, estimated that about 65% of a typical federal office building’s square footage is actual office space. In a separate analysis, Hutchens said CBRE found that about 35% of the space in the FBI’s headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, consists of offices.

Hutchens said that the way the data is currently being collected and interpreted, agencies would have no realistic way to achieve the USE IT Act’s occupancy goals.

“If you’re going to enforce the USE IT Act, you’re going to have to revise the way the data is collected,” Hutchens said. “Right now it’s being overcounted so significantly that none of the agencies can meet the test.”

In response, Perry suggested that agencies should perhaps set an even higher bar for federal building occupancy.

“Libraries, auditoriums, et cetera, aren’t going to be full all the time, but if we excluded them, then we’re looking at something more like 80%, right? Maybe that’s unrealistic,” he said. “This is hard to go to the general public and say you’re going to pay for these buildings, and 20% or 40% are going to be empty.”

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