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Federal Agencies Maintain Offices That Sit Mostly Empty
A new Government Accountability Office report notes that of 24 federal agencies, none of their headquarters are more than half-staffed on an average day.
by Joe Lancaster Reason.com
The federal government is sitting on millions of square feet of unused office space.
That’s the upshot of a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that even before the COVID-19 pandemic cleared out offices and introduced much of the country to remote work, “federal agencies have long struggled to determine how much office space they need to fulfill their missions.”
“The federal government owns over 460 million square feet of office space that costs billions annually to operate and maintain,” the report notes.
The GAO surveyed the 24 federal agencies that use most of the federal government’s buildings; these included the Departments of State, Commerce, Justice, Transportation, Homeland Security, and Education, as well as agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.