Commercial office buildings nationwide are using a variety of strategies and tactics to entice workers return to the office in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. From revamped office designs to expanded menus of amenities, building owners and facility executives are trying anything they can think of. While results of these efforts among privately owned office buildings have been mixed, one sector of the office buildings market — federal office buildings — has seen disappointing results.
Federal agencies are overlooking a prime opportunity to reduce the size of the federal real estate footprint and save billions of dollars in the process. That’s coming from the Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB), an independent agency focused on selling valuable but underused government buildings. PBRB’s data analysis finds the federal headquarters buildings operated at 12 percent of their estimated capacity, on average, between January and September 2023.
It finds agencies have more office space than the federal workforce needs, and the cost of maintaining this space keeps increasing, according to the Federal News Network. In an interim report to Congress last month, the PBRB said the “status quo of nearly empty federal buildings is not financially or politically sustainable.”
The report finds many federal buildings owned by the General Services Administration (GSA) are over 50 years old and showing their age at a time when the agency faces a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog.
The Government Accountability Office found last summer that all agency headquarters buildings in the Washington, D.C., area had excess space, including 17 that had an average building utilization of just 25 percent.
The PBRB’s report goes one step beyond GAO’s data snapshot. The board analyzed commercially available, anonymized cell phone data at federal building locations across D.C., between 8:00 am and 6:00 p.m. and repeated visitation patterns to identify an estimated number of occupants for each building.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
