WASHINGTON, D.C. - Rep. French Hill (AR-02) named the United States General Services Administration (GSA) as the latest recipient of his Golden Fleece Award for their inability to properly address decades-long problems associated with managing the federal government’s real property portfolio.
Rep. Hill said, “The United States Government Accountability Office has included GSA’s management of the federal government’s more than a quarter-million buildings on its High Risk List since 2003. Annual maintenance and operating costs total more than $10 billion a year for these facilities, but in less than a decade, deferred maintenance costs have risen $200 billion. Inaction to ensure that maintenance occurs in a timely manner, underutilization of office spaces, and inaccurate record-keeping are just a few of the reasons why these buildings continue to deteriorate at a rapid pace. As the agency responsible for managing these assets, GSA bears the responsibility of coordinating a government-wide commitment to control these ballooning expenses. GSA must work with all federal agencies to take action and rein in ballooning costs associated with an aging and neglected collection of federal facilities across the country.”
In a letter to the Acting Administrator of the GSA, Stephen Ehikian, Rep. Hill writes:
Dear Acting Administrator Ehikian:
I write today to inform you that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is the most recent recipient of my Golden Fleece Award. I am awarding this to the GSA because of your agency’s long-running challenges of effectively managing the federal government’s real property portfolio.
The United States federal government manages or owns more than 277,000 buildings with annual maintenance and operating costs exceeding $10.3 billion in fiscal year 2023. The federal government’s property includes buildings, land, and other real estate; however, the federal government struggles to efficiently and effectively manage this vast property portfolio. Underutilized space and increased telework since COVID-19 have complicated management issues but are far from the only factors worsening the problem. At the same time, agency officials want to reconfigure office space to support increased telework and maximize the use of their headquarters buildings. In addition, the process for disposing of federal assets remains complex, and agencies like the Federal Protective Service and the Department of Homeland Security struggle to secure governmental property from security threats. GSA’s failures to lead all agencies in property management are leading to excessive and wasteful government spending in both the short and long terms, all at the expense of the American taxpayers.
The federal government’s excessive property and office utilization challenges have made space-saving benefits unrealized. Under the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act (FASTA) of 2016, the GSA, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the temporary Public Buildings Reform Board are required to collaborate in conducting three rounds of property assessment and elimination. Yet, GSA has not established a plan to learn from mistakes made during the initial steps of its property assessment processes. In October 2023, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the headquarters of 17 of 24 federal agencies had office occupancy at or below 25 percent for 1 week in each of the first three months of 2023. Worse still, the processes set out in FASTA have been hampered by delays and failures, leading to only 12 properties being identified for elimination, of which only 10 have been actually sold. GSA must develop a process to identify and implement solutions that address the setbacks met during the FASTA process. If agencies continue to operate in poorly configured office buildings, they will continue to underutilize them and spend unnecessarily on operating funds.GSA continues to fail to manage data on federal properties, relying on federal agencies to submit accurate data to the Federal Real Property Profile database. In 2020, GAO found that 67 percent of addresses in GSA's database were incorrect or incorrectly formatted. While GSA has improved the accuracy of addresses in its Federal Real Property Profile database, the data are not yet reliable, making the management of federally owned assets more difficult. Data quality improvement guidance from August 2024 instructed agencies to accurately describe the attributes of their real property assets and to concentrate their initial data quality improvement efforts on certain data elements – mostly static elements such as property type and property use, which can be easily verified externally. This guidance is still nascent and beginning to take effect. However, these measures, along with tools that alert agencies to potentially incorrect location data and errors in key data fields, continue to fail, causing information to be inaccurate and incomplete.
Federal facilities also remain unsecured, which is blatantly unacceptable. While the Federal Protective Service (FPS), a federal law enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has taken some actions to address the long-standing staffing challenges, staff shortages persist, with more than 21 percent of FPS positions being unfilled in 2022. In 2024, GAO conducted 27 covert tests, and FPS contract guards failed to detect prohibited items about half the time. At a minimum, more consistent data and analysis about the causes of these failures are required to improve this issue. The Interagency Security Committee, overseen by DHS as well, works with FPS to oversee the implementation of security measures to protect federal facilities by various agencies. Compounding the problem, FPS's data system, which verifies the qualifications of contract guards, known as the Post Tracking System, faces technological, interoperable, and reliability issues. The Post Tracking System should be assessed to determine whether it needs to be corrected or completely replaced.
Both Congress and the public lack clarity on these anticipated costs necessary to support critical government functions regarding deferred maintenance costs. Agency officials indicated to GAO that they need additional budget resources to reconfigure their spaces to support increased telework, ranking this as the biggest challenge to increasing utilization of headquarters buildings; however, the agencies cannot justify such requests without accurate budgetary and cost information. In 2023, GAO reviewed four agencies and found that none of them fully communicated the potential costs of maintenance backlogs to Congress, such as information explaining how much of their backlog supported agency missions. Agencies will need to procure better information on the scale and potential impacts of their repair backlogs and the benefits of modern configurations to justify to Congress funding associated with facility repair and maintenance needs. Making that case more difficult for agency heads, GSA has not effectively monitored maintenance contractors to ensure that they are executing required maintenance and repairs, allowing some work orders to be marked as completed even though that was not the case. From fiscal years 2017 to 2024, the repair backlogs for DOD and federal civilian buildings have more than doubled from $171 billion to $370 billion. If this trend does not reverse, federal assets will continue to deteriorate, leading to premature replacement, which could be significantly more expensive than the cost of repairs had they not been delayed.
While progress has been made on this issue and some elements have been addressed, the $3.6 billion in financial benefits reaped since 2003 still pale in comparison to the rising costs. Congress and the President have taken action to help, enacting the USE IT Act in January 2025 to require federal agencies to measure their use of public buildings and reduce excess capacity. Opportunities remain to enhance efficiency and reduce taxpayer spending, such as disposing and consolidating office space and supporting multiagency co-locations. I encourage you to work with OMB, DHS, and all other federal agencies to begin addressing these issues about our federal government’s real property portfolio – from security and staffing to data tracking and oversight.
I am committed to ensuring effective fiscal practices at our Nation's federal agencies. Should you require any additional authority from Congress to address these concerns, I urge you to notify us as soon as possible. I would also welcome any technical assistance you could provide to Congress to correct statutory issues that may have contributed to this problem. Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to working with you to address this important issue.
