The GSA administrator on the agency’s plans for the President’s management agenda in 2023

The General Services Administration has been busy since passage of the American Rescue Plan two years ago and, most recently, the Inflation Reduction Act. GSA is applying funds to fulfill several parts of the President’s Management Agenda. For a progress report and look ahead, Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan.

Interview transcript:

Robin Carnahan
So we got in the infrastructure bill from a year or so ago, a lot of money to invest in our land ports of entry, those are land border crossings. So we’re going to be investing in improving 26 of those on the northern and southern borders. And I was able to visit one in Arizona, far Western Arizona, in San Luis, it’s the second busiest land port in Arizona. And it has been on the list to get money from that infrastructure bill. But also, because we were able to have funding through the Inflation Reduction Act, we’re going to be able to not only meet the needs of Homeland Security, for the 3 million people, vehicles, that crossing two and a half million pedestrians that crossed this every year, we’re gonna be able to do it in a really sustainable way. And what I mean by that is, we’re going to be able to improve that project from what was going to be a LEED Gold Project, now LEED Platinum. So that’s improvements in all kinds of energy efficiency. And we’re also going to shoot for making it net zero, this particular community, they tell me gets 360 days of sun every year, which means it is perfectly set up for us to use solar and other kinds of renewable energies that we know over time, lower costs, and are more environmentally friendly. So makes all kinds of sense.

Tom Temin
And this is not exactly a building, right?

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Robin Carnahan
Well, it is a building. So we’re doing a few things. So these, if you’ve ever crossed the border, you know part of it is if you’re going by vehicle, you’ve got to have lanes of cars, and you don’t want to have a lot of those. So we’re going to be expanding from eight to 16 lanes for them. Also, the infrastructure we’re putting in is going to allow them to do more scanning, sort of high quality and speedier scanning of vehicles to make sure they are secure and aren’t bringing things, contraband into the country. And then there are also going to be buildings, both for the staff, but also for the pedestrians that go back and forth. Because this particular land port has two and a half million pedestrians they walk through every year. Some are kids that are going to school in the United States, but their parents live in Mexico; mostly however, it’s migrant workers, farm workers, who are providing us with all kinds of food that’s produced in that part of Arizona.

Tom Temin
All right, and there are some little details I wanted to ask you about only because they were in the release that GSA wrote, but there are low carbon incorporating materials used for the lanes and the building and the steel, low carbon, concrete, asphalt and steel.

Robin Carnahan
Yeah, OK, you’re gonna get to be as excited about low embodied carbon building materials as I am. This is not a thing I would have thought of years ago, I would care that much about but it’s really, really interesting. So if you think about emissions, there are emissions that come out of your car when you drive it. There are emissions that come out of a building when you put it on a heater or air conditioner, but there are also emissions and carbon that is in the supply chain of the products that go into your car, right. And so we at GSA and the federal government buy a lot of some things that typically have been really high carbon producing items: asphalt, concrete, steel and glass. So one of the things we are focused on and some of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act is focused on low embodied carbon building materials. So those four things are really top of our list. And so we’ve announced down there the first tranche of projects, which is eight projects, totaling $300 million, that are going to be attacking those things. So in the IRA, we got about $2 billion to do these low carbon materials, and another billion for emerging technologies, which is really, really interesting because federal facilities can be like test beds to really prove out some of these newer technologies, which makes great sense. And then another $250 million for high performing green building. So it really is a triple win, as I see it, all of this, because it’s not all these investments. It’s not just about hugging trees. It really is about creating good domestic jobs in a green energy economy and boosting our competitiveness and security, frankly, because that we’ve seen what happens when you’re dependent on other countries for your energy. And we cannot have that in the United States. So good for jobs, good for national security, good for the economy. But it’s also great for taxpayers, because we’re going to be lowering energy costs, right? So it’s a smart investment. And then obviously, it’s good for the environment. And it’s good to have a healthier planet for our kids and the next generation. So these are all just big wins across the board. And GSA is proud to be part of it.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Robin Carnahan, she’s administrator of the General Services Administration. And what about federal buildings writ large, and I’ve been following the various energy reduction programs since the Clinton administration. Finally the GSA has carried out on buildings and also new buildings, new construction, there’s been quite a few new construction for federal buildings since those years. What’s the next round going to look like? Are there learnings from projects like this, that can apply to existing and new construction under GSA’s vast portfolio?

Robin Carnahan
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, as you said, we’ve been doing this for a long time. This isn’t new, trying to make our buildings more efficient, it’s the same thing we do at our homes we’re doing at GSA across our entire portfolio. And so I’ve been able to visit a number of these. I was at New Carrollton last year with Energy Secretary Granholm. And we saw what was possible with the IRS building, federal building out there by doing some upgrades to sensors and putting in new HVAC systems and high efficiency chillers, we were able to reduce energy by 60%. I mean it’s just astounding, right? And cut greenhouse gas emissions at the same time and save two and a half million dollars a year in operating costs. So, these are smart investments, we were up in Portland, Maine, and one of the oldest facilities in our whole portfolio is 150 year old customs house up there. And we put heat pumps in, right geothermal heat pumps in this old building, and cut energy costs by 30%. Smart investments for the American taxpayer and the Denver Federal Center, we’re putting all renewable energy. And so we’ve learned a lot by these things. But we also because of this new IRA money, have the ability to do more of these kinds of smart investments that over time are going to save money, and improve the environment and create more jobs.

And so one of those is in Lakewood, Colorado, it’s an FDA lab that we’re going to be able to put all kinds of energy savings equipment in and use green proving ground products in there. So we’re excited about it. And Chicago, we’re, you know, going to be putting glass, I told you glass was one of those high carbon emitting things. So we’re going to put low embodied carbon glass and in the upgrades in the federal building, in Chicago, it’s going to save a ton of money, and reduce emissions. Same thing and the courthouse in Portland, Maine, same thing down in Virginia, at the courthouse in Richmond, we’re going to be putting more low body carbon glass. And so all of these things are both good for the environment, good for our portfolio and save money. So we’re just gonna keep doing it.

Tom Temin
And while we’re talking about federal space, there’s lots of calls for the government to accelerate the reduction of space that it needs or uses because people are continuing to telework, we just had the mayor of D.C. tell the government, the federal government, come back or move out so something else can move in. And what are your plans there? I mean, this is a multi agency complicated question about what space you really need when people come to work some days and don’t some other days.

Robin Carnahan
Absolutely, look, optimizing that federal footprint and the portfolio is a high priority for all of us, we know that we can have this be more efficient, right. And we plan to do that. We’re reliant on our agency partners to tell us what their space needs are. And so in December, agencies were providing these kinds of plans to OMB. And so we’re working closely with OMB to take a look at what their agency space needs are. And once we have a look at that, we’re going to be able to, like begin to focus on how we can consolidate and sort of rationalize the portfolio. I’ll tell you that for all agencies that GSA included, top of the list here is mission delivery, right, making sure we are delivering on the mission, even in a new work environment. And so as that’s all going on, and that sort of planning process by agencies, we’re not sitting around doing nothing. We are testing new ideas, because we know that how people work and where they work is going to look different. We don’t know exactly what it’s gonna look like. It’s probably going to change over time. But what we’re doing is testing out new things and making it easy for people to sort of see what space configurations could look like and could be different. We’re looking at commercial as well as federal co-working spaces. So if you think about, you know, people maybe not wanting to commute all the way into the center city. But if there’s a building closer to home, that is a secure facility that they can go work in, then that makes sense, we should experiment with that and see if that could meet some of our agency partner’s needs. We’re also doing a thing, I think later this month, actually, it’s called the Workplace Innovation Lab. And we’re doing it here at 1800 F. And the idea is, we have a bunch of different configurations and setups of office space, that are more reflective of this new work environment. And so agencies can come in and look at it, they can put their teams in, they can work there for a day, they can work there for a week, and just sort of see if it meets their needs. And so it’s a little bit of a try before you buy approach. So we’re excited about that. And then of course, we’re thinking about disposals and consolidations. And so we have teams that are looking through the whole portfolio to figure out which of these things that do make more sense to dispose of. I will say, in all of this, this isn’t just the federal government that’s going through these exercises, this is everybody, because the future of work is going to look a little bit different than it has looked in the past. And we’re trying to get ahead of that. What we also are sort of interested in observing and see from our partners is that one of the new amenities for being in offices is human interaction. You don’t want to just go into an office and sit in it, sit in a closed room, on a Zoom call all day and not see other people, you go into an office because you have a reason to interact with people on your team. And so we want to be able to set up spaces and environments that sort of encourage that kind of collaboration and that value.

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Tom Temin
But it’s safe to say that the consolidations then, if they happen will be in both leased space and government-owned space.

Robin Carnahan
Sure. I mean, we need to look at the whole portfolio.

Tom Temin
Right, just like the Army Corps of Engineers is in the GAO building, that kind of thing. Somebody could move into a wing of Commerce or something, or Agriculture.

Robin Carnahan
Conversations are happening all the time. And interestingly in the past, while people may have been more reluctant to have those conversations, everybody is having them now. It’s very interesting. And I think a real opportunity for us.

Tom Temin
We are up against an ad break. Can you stick with us for one more section?

Robin Carnahan
I can.

Tom Temin
All right. My guest is Robin Carnahan, she’s administrator of the General Services Administration. I wanted to ask you about the American Rescue Plan that goes back a little bit further than the other two laws we were talking about. And there’s been a lot of activity under that. And that’s two years in, but there’s still money left, maybe highlight some of spending and accomplishments that GSA has had with that money?

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Robin Carnahan
Sure. So yeah, the American Rescue Plan, that was that was a bit before my time at GSA, but we have been able to invest some very significant things. The tech modernization fund is one of the places that got significant money, it got a billion dollars and the ARP, and we have been able to really with that money scale up that team and operation, we’ve now issued more than $600 million for dozens of projects. And just so everybody knows what the Tech Modernization Fund is all about. To me, I think it’s one of the most sensible, smartest investments we can make as a government, because it is, for a couple of reasons. One, the normal budget cycle is really long and slow and unpredictable.

Tom Temin
And it’s not very normal either.

Robin Carnahan
Correct. In these ways, it hasn’t been very normal. But technology needs change really fast. And so you have sort of this out of sync situation where you have fast change, and slow funding. And so we wonder why the government is behind on modernization is because of much of it’s because of that process. So the Tech Modernization Funds, allows agencies to move at the speed of need, if they have some need, they can come to the TMF apply in a pretty quick way for money and have that turned around pretty quickly. And so they don’t have to ask for big amounts. They don’t have to wait for years. They can move at the speed of need. And so we also have technologists that are assessing the investment requests, which also makes a lot more sense to me. And so all of it makes sense. And so we’ve got a great team. They’re thinking about this like investments, which means they they’re only given money where there’s going to be value that’s going to come out of it. And so they have invested now and $600 million worth in dozens of projects. And a lot of those have been around cybersecurity, and including zero trust architecture for four or five different agencies. And that’s actually really interesting too, because if you have a cohort of agencies, small, medium, large, all kinds of doing the same thing, you can get a lot of learnings from that, right and figure out how to then share those learnings and scale this to other agencies. So that’s great.

And then more recently, we’ve been investing in customer facing services and improving those. So we dedicated about $100 million for that. And there have been lots of really interesting programs that have come out of that. So Tech Modernization Fund, that’s one set of money that came from the ARP. A lot of that, as I said, has been about streamlining the process, reducing burdens, saving tax money, cybersecurity, like all of those really important things we need, we need to do. Another big investment in ARP was in the Federal Citizen Services Fund, as you know, and that’s been another place where a lot of these technology platforms that can help across the board are so important, and they’re done. One in particular that we use some of that money for was the ChildTaxCredit.gov website. I don’t know if you check that out yourself. But 61 million kids were able to like, have their tax credits given to their parents using that in a very low friction way.

Tom Temin
I haven’t. But I’m going to ask now, I’ll tell you that.

Robin Carnahan
Yeah, you should. So that that’s was a big deal. And, you know, it also helped stand up the U.S. Digital Corps, which is another one of these early career technologists coming into government being deployed in agencies to improve technology. So yeah, there’s a lot of neat stuff. That’s been we’ve been able to do because of ARP funding.

Tom Temin
So the customer experience, as it’s now called for, I guess that’s a subset of citizen services, but you want citizen services to have good customer experience. Seems like that’s kind of come together in that sense.

Robin Carnahan
Yeah. Look, I think across the government, we’re focused more on that the President last year had an executive order that he signed on customer experience. And so to have the President of the United States set the bar on, one of the things that we have to do as an administration and all of our agencies, is focused on our customers, delivering a delightful experience to them, that is more like what they get in the rest of their lives, and by refocusing on our customers rather than internal operations, or silos or funding streams, is a sensible way to make sure government’s delivering value to the people that we serve. And a quick

Tom Temin
Question on a small contract is something called the American Institutes for Research to, ‘examine the role of the American rescue plan in advancing equitable outcomes.’ What were you actually buying there? And what will that tell us?

Robin Carnahan
Yeah, that’s an interesting, interesting question. We, as you probably know, we have an office of evaluation sciences, it’s called at the GSA. And the job of this team is to make sure government programs are effective and efficient and equitable, right, that they do what they’re intended to do. And this has been around for a long time since 2015. They’ve done 90 evaluations with 20 different agencies, you can go to the website has a whole bunch of really interesting stuff on it. And so this is just another example of wanting to learn whether the policies are working. And so that’s what we are. That’s what we’re investing in there.

Tom Temin
And just a final question on 2023. What are you hoping to do in this coming year?

Robin Carnahan
Well, look, I the word of the year, I told the team the other day is delivery. We have three and a half billion dollars to upgrade land ports of entry around the country, we have another almost three and a half billion dollars to to invest in these sustainability and low carbon emissions and improve efficiency of buildings. The team is ready to go on that. And so this is about execution and delivery this year. Likewise, with the folks on the technology and the fast side. It’s about delivering for our customers in ways that reduce friction and make it easier to do business with GSA. So we’re really excited about all that.

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