Underused federal office data incomplete but improving 

Agencies have better data on office space they’re using and underutilized space they should offload, but a governmentwide watchdog finds they’re still working with an incomplete picture. 

The federal government’s landlord, the General Services Administration, published its first governmentwide snapshot of federal building utilization data in March. That snapshot was required under the USE IT Act, which former President Joe Biden signed in his final weeks in office. 

The legislation requires agencies to demonstrate that their buildings meet at least a 60% utilization rate or develop plans to downsize their office space. GSA’s initial USE IT Act data shows thousands of federal buildings haven’t met the 60% utilization benchmark. 

Agencies spend billions of dollars annually to operate and maintain federal buildings. GAO has flagged this as a high-risk issue for more than 20 years. 

Underutilized federal buildings became a more prominent issue late in the Biden administration, when agencies largely kept in place pandemic era work-from-home policies.

Officials from GSA, the Small Business Administration and the departments of Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs told the Government Accountability Office in an Oct. 16 report that USE IT Act data is driving decisions to consolidate or dispose of underutilized office space. 

More than half of the 23 agencies GAO surveyed said they expect USE IT Act data will drive downsizing decisions that will result in millions of dollars in cost savings. 

But GAO wrote in its report that gaps in USE IT Act data are giving agencies an incomplete understanding of the state of their real estate footprint. 

It wrote that the USE IT Act data leaves out some vacant federal building space. It also warned that agencies are counting rooms like cafeterias and auditoriums as office space, which could present an inflated picture of underutilization. 

“While surveyed agencies generally agreed that USE IT Act data are helpful, about one-third expressed concerns about how GSA data collection and reporting guidelines affect their utilization rate calculations,” GAO wrote. 

The report states that USE IT Act data does not yet include vacant, GSA-controlled owned and leased office spaces without an occupancy agreement. 

“A hypothetical 10-floor federal building with three fully vacant floors could have a 65 percent utilization rate based on the current approach to USE IT Act reporting,” GAO wrote. “However, if this building’s three vacant floors were to be included in the calculation, the building’s true utilization rate would be 45 percent — well below the 60 percent threshold set by the USE IT Act.”

According to GAO, 155 fully vacant buildings and leased spaces covering 4.6 million total usable square were not included in GSA's initial USE IT Act reporting. 

“Without this information, Congress and the public may have an inaccurate impression of the extent to which owned and leased office spaces are being utilized, including some locations that are likely being utilized at lower or higher rates than reported,” GAO wrote. 

Agencies told GAO that about 22% of their owned and leased space is subject to USE IT Act occupancy data collection and reporting requirements. The report states that “federal agencies are reporting occupancy data for a relatively small portion of their federal assets.”  

Officials from eight of the 23 agencies surveyed expressed concerns about including spaces where employees typically don’t have workstations – including kitchens, conference rooms, and auditoriums –  as “typical office space” in their USE IT Act data. 

“GSA guidelines for what to include in ‘typical office space’ when implementing the USE IT Act clearly indicate that these types of spaces are to be reported in occupancy data,” GAO wrote. 

Agency officials said including this space in their USE IT Act data “artificially increased the office space” they reported having and “lowered calculated utilization rates.” 

“Due to these concerns, some agencies told us that they prefer to rely upon their own internal metrics, rather than USE IT Act data, to understand the utilization of their owned and leased spaces,” GAO wrote. 

GAO wrote that GSA officials understand agency concerns and “do not intend to consider USE IT Act data alone when making space reduction decisions.” 

A GSA spokesperson told Government Executive in a statement that the agency “is in full compliance with the statute and data reporting requirements of the USE IT Act and is actively working with its executive branch partners to address the recommendations outlined in the report.” 

Andrew Heller, the acting commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in June that GSA is “not necessarily seeing an apples-to-apples comparison” with the USE IT Act data that’s been collected so far. 

“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 said. 

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 Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent agency that advises GSA on owned properties should consider offloading, flagged some shortcomings with the data this summer. 

The PBRB wrote on its website on June 29 that GSA’s USE IT ACT data only accounts for a total of around 275,000 federal employees — a small fraction of the 2 million employees in the federal workforce.

“The conclusions that can be drawn from the data are not generalizable to the entire portfolio,” the board wrote. “The veracity of the data is unknown, as well.”

Paul Walden, the board’s executive director, told Government Executive that the board has yet to hear from GSA on steps to improve the quality of USE IT Act data.  

“It's missing some buildings and some personnel, but it's really hard to tell what exactly is missing,” Walden said on Wednesday. “This USE IT Act [data] is really sort of the tip of the iceberg. I think that's going to reveal some pretty shocking things about the government's portfolio, once we get into it.” 

One member of the board, Dan Mathews, a former commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service under the first Trump administration, said he “fought for this data for a long time” when working at GSA, and that the data will help  inform GSA’s future building disposal plans.

“There are some issues with the data, but it’s a good first step,” Mathews said at a June 25 board meeting. “There are some details that are going to be improved, but this is absolutely critical to make good decisions.”

While the USE IT Act data gives some indication of building utilization rates, Mathews said it doesn’t tell the whole story. 

He said no FBI field office, for example, would meet the 60% occupancy threshold without differentiating office space from the square footage of holding cells, evidence rooms and armories.

“The reality is there are a lot of exceptions that are going to have to be made,” Mathews said about the data GSA has collected so far.