Feds Only Using 12% of Office Space at Agency HQ in DC

A new report is setting off alarm bells in the hallways of the offices of the federal government—if there is anyone walking around in there to listen to them.

According to the Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB), federal government agencies are using an average of only 12% of the office space in their headquarters buildings in Washington, DC.

To put that in perspective, the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, owns or leases 90M SF in DC, which makes it the city’s largest office occupant.

The PBRB says the GSA’s Public Buildings Service is spending $2B a year to maintain government-owned agency office space as well as $5B annually to lease space for government agencies, the lion’s share of which are not being used.

The PBRB, an independent federal agency created by the Federal Assets and Transfer Act of 2016, is tasked with recommending the disposal of underutilized federal properties.

According to the agency’s new report, issued on March 21, the “massive scale” of underutilized federal property creates an “outsized opportunity to save money and improve outcomes through property disposals and smarter real estate decisions.”

“Billions of dollars are being expended on buildings that should be disposed of given the new normal of low occupancy. The solution is relatively simple but…leadership [is] urgently needed to change course,” the report said.

Using anonymous cellphone data between January and September 2023 to measure occupancy at 23 large government buildings in DC, PBRB found that the 1M SF HQ of the Department of Health and Human Services had a 14% utilization rate last year based on a capacity of 200 SF per employee.

At the Department of Labor’s 1.9M SF headquarters, the report found, only about 441 workers use the offices on an average day in a building that costs $60M to rent and operate.

That’s a crowd compared to the average daily turnout at the Department of Energy’s 1.8M SF HQ on Independence Avenue, where PBRB says eight people are using the building.

The report adds a caveat that this ultra-low headcount is “likely to be flawed” but says PBRA reached out to DOE for an explanation and did not get a response. Maybe nobody was there to answer the phone.

The GSA, which runs all the government real estate, isn’t brimming with people at its 813K SF HQ on F St., according to the report. The average occupancy at the GSA is 14%.

The results from the PBRB study indicate that the federal office occupancy problem actually is getting worse: a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last summer said a majority of government agencies were using 25% or less of the HQ capacity of 17 government agencies in 39 buildings encompassing more than 21M SF.