Many Americans are convinced that the federal government either does too much to control their daily lives or does not work at all.
Yet whatever work is getting done in Washington is not being done in the spacious office buildings supplied by taxpayers.
According to The Washington Times, many federal office buildings are ghost towns — sans the tumbleweeds.
The Times reported last week on a new Government Accountability Office report that revealed two dozen federal agencies had offices with an average vacancy rate of about 80% during the time period the GAO studied earlier this year.
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“Not a single agency topped 50% use,” the Times noted.
The problem of the federal government “paying for massive square footage it just doesn’t need anymore” has reached “crisis levels,” the Times reported, driven there first by the COVID-19 panic and then by subsequent demands from workers to be allowed to telework.
“During the pandemic, federal agencies operated under a maximum telework posture, with many employees working away from the office,” David Marroni, acting director of the GAO’s physical infrastructure team, told the Times.
“As the country emerges from the pandemic and agencies continue to offer telework as an option, the federal government has a unique opportunity to reconsider how much and what type of office space it needs.”
Yet the agencies aren’t willing to give taxpayers a break, the Times noted.
For one thing, office-sharing was out because some agencies don’t want to be perceived as second-tier to others. In other cases, agencies declined to give up space out of fear workers may return because telework is seen as a “fading fad.”
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The GAO study analyzed office-use rates at each agency for one week each in January, February, and March.
The six agencies at the top were the Commerce, Justice, State, Treasury, and Homeland Security departments and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They averaged 36% occupancy during the study period, although none of them topped 50%.
Net were the Energy, Labor, Interior, and Health and Human Services departments, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Defense Department’s building at Mark Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Their collective use rate averaged 23%.
The third group included the Education, Transportation and Veterans Affairs departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. Combined, they averaged a 16% use rate.
Finally, at the bottom, were the Agriculture Department, the Social Security Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and even the General Services Administration, which serves as the federal government’s landlord. They averaged 9%.
This is the second damaging report issued by the Biden administration about the absentee level in the federal government.
As the Tampa Free Press reported in early October, a watchdog group known as Open the Books issued a report that found eight federal agencies spent $3.3 billion on new furniture from 2020 to 2022, even as none them topped 35% occupancy in that time because of the pandemic.
Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski noted in a statement at the time, “For some reason, we’ve bankrolled another billion dollars in desks, chairs, couches and more — while employees clock in from their own living rooms.”
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