The prospect of hundreds of federal properties going on the chopping block made headlines earlier this month. The 423 buildings that were listed are just a fraction of the 277,000 buildings the government owns, and many of the properties in this massive inventory are underused, plagued by backlogged maintenance and inadequately secured, a report by the U.S. The Government Accountability Office says.
“The government has retained more property than it needs,” David Marroni, GAO’s director of physical infrastructure, told a House subcommittee earlier this month while testifying about the report. “It has not had reliable real property data to support decision-making, and it has struggled with facility security.”
More than 20 years ago, GAO named this vast property portfolio a high risk to the federal government. Congress enacted a handful of laws to help the executive branch make improvements. One law, the 2016 Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act, gives the government authority to speed the sale of underused properties. Only 10 buildings have so far been sold under the FAST Act, generating $194 million in proceeds, according to GAO.
Another law, enacted last year, requires the government to dispose of buildings that can’t show at least 60% occupancy for two years in a row. That law is too new for any properties to be disposed of under it yet.
Part of the problem for the General Services Administration, which manages the government’s real estate, is bad data, GAO says. In a 2020 review of GSA’s property database, almost 70% of the addresses had errors, according to the report. GSA has since made improvements, but location data continues to be a problem, GAO says.
Security at federal facilities is also poor. GAO conducted a test last year at 27 facilities in which the Federal Protective Services uses contract guards. It found the guards failed the test half of the time.
“These results … raise questions about how effectively the guards detect prohibited items,” GAO says.
The problem could be related to the way guards are vetted. “The data system that [the Federal Protective Service] uses to verify if contract guards are qualified to stand post — the Post Tracking System — continues to face technology and data reliability challenges,” GAO says.
When GAO designated real estate as a high-risk problem for the government in 2003, it was partly because of these two problems — bad data and poor security — and also because so many properties are underused. In January, the agency added another reason for the designation, Marroni said in his testimony: backlogged maintenance and repair.
In 2017, the backlog was $171 billion. Today it’s $370 billion.
“Unless this trend reverses, federal assets will continue to deteriorate and need premature replacement, which can be significantly more expensive than the cost of repairs had they not been delayed,” Marroni said.
Part of the problem has to do with the age of the buildings and the needs of a contemporary workforce.
“Federal agencies’ spaces are not well configured to meet modern office needs,” the report says. “If agencies continue to operate in poorly configured office buildings, they will continue to under use space, spending unnecessary operating funds.”
GSA’s lax oversight of the work contractors are hired to do is another problem. “Operations and maintenance contractors did not complete all work orders for service requests and preventive maintenance,” the report says. “In some cases, operations and maintenance contractors marked work orders as complete even though the work was not actually completed.”
Although the government has acted on many recommendations GAO has made since naming the government’s property portfolio a high risk, almost 60 recommendations haven’t been fully implemented, the agency says. One of them is GSA’s failure to work with other agencies that have properties that can be sold.
“GSA should help federal agencies improve the disposal of underused property by applying lessons from the [2016 law] to improve future disposal efforts,” GAO says.
