Government estimates suggest there may be 77,000 empty or underutilized buildings across the country. Taxpayers own them, and even vacant, they’re expensive. The Office of Management and Budget says these buildings could be costing taxpayers $1.7 billion a year.
But doing something with these buildings is a complicated job, partly because the federal government does not know what it owns.
Wise and his colleagues have been using the only known centralized database that the government has, the Federal Real Property Profile, and it’s not reliable, he says.
This federally owned cabin in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee was reported in the Federal Real Property Profile database as being in excellent condition.
Courtesy of GAO
“We’d see a building that maybe looked something like this, and the data would say it was 100 percent utilized, and we’d look around and see nobody,” he says. “We’d go to other buildings, and [the list would] say it was unutilized, and we’d find that the building was overcrowded.”
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 report found that, on average, 17 of the 24 agencies surveyed used 25 percent or less of the available space in their headquarters buildings. Even agencies on the higher end only averaged between 40 percent and 49 percent.
This federally owned cabin in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee was reported in the Federal Real Property Profile database as being in excellent condition.
I can find more that are in good condition than you can find in poor condition. Like I said they have them all over the country. They have some up in Alaska where you can have a lake all to yourself.
Nope, reports are that DOGE is not working with GAO. In a classic example example of government wastefulness, DOGE is recreating work that has already been done by other agencies.
I predict DOGE will wind up costing far more money than it saves. But it is funneling tax dollars into crony’s pockets, so it is serving its purpose.
There’s probably a plan for that; sell government assets to the wealthy. Eventually, the government owns nothing, the middle- and working-class own nothing, the wealthy own it all, and then they wage wars to get assets from each other, sending us to die for them. It’s an old story.
