House Republicans Want Federal Agencies to Return to the Office

House Republicans introduced a bill aimed at forcing federal agencies to have workers return to the office. But it’s unclear how much of a priority that actually is or whether the GOP representatives would use potential conflicts — a government shutdown or debt ceiling-induced default — as bargaining chips.

The topic is of interest to the CRE office sector because of the amount of space the federal government leases and the plans of most agencies to reduce their use. As of March 2022, according to General Services Administration figures, the GSA managed 7,760 leases for almost 180 million square feet and $5.7 billion in annual rent. Then there are more than 19,500 buildings the federal government owns, which includes some 511 million square feet of office space.

However, the GAO surveyed 24 federal agencies on plans to reduce leased space. Of those, 16 said they would reduce the number of leases and 19 planned to reduce square footage over the next three years. That could have a big impact on property owners.

The House bill is called the “Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems,” or “SHOW UP” Act of 2023. If it should become law, it would require within 30 days of enactment that every federal agency would have to return to the “telework policies, practices, and levels of the agency as in effect on December 31, 2019, and may not expand any such policy, practices, or levels until the date that an agency plan is submitted to Congress with a certification by the Director of the Office of Personnel Management.”

Agencies would within six months have to provide of the “impacts on the agency and its mission of expanding telework by its employees” during the pandemic.

Many bills have introductory sections that offer rationales and reasons for the proposed legislation. This bill has none of it.

But the general sense seems similar to what The Real Estate Roundtable suggested in a letter to President Biden in December 2022.

“We therefore respectfully urge you to direct federal agencies to enhance their consideration of the impact of agency employee remote working on communities, surrounding small employers, transit systems, local tax bases and other important considerations, along with the direct effect on governmental service delivery and labor productivity,” the letter read. “In addition, we ask for your support of legislation to facilitate the increased conversion of underutilized office and other commercial real estate to much-needed housing.”

The chance of this bill becoming law is small, at least in the next couple of years. That would require a Senate controlled by Democrats, along with a Democratic president, to go along with the idea. Also, it is unclear how important the bill might be to the Republicans, even though it appeared early in the session.

Republicans could use passage of a final budget or even an increase of the debt ceiling, to push the measure into law, assuming they could keep their members in line.