Imagine running a private company where most of your office buildings failed to meet even a 60% utilization target, yet you continued paying the rent, utilities, maintenance, security, repairs, and operating costs year after year. How long would that company survive? Welcome to the federal government.
The Government Accountability Office examined the Department of Transportation’s real estate portfolio and found that 89% of its 189 federally owned and leased office buildings failed to meet the government’s own 60% utilization benchmark. That means only about ONE IN TEN met the standard. Taxpayers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year maintaining office space that in many cases is dramatically underused. The waste is blatant enough to be a non-partisan issue. Obama even broached the topic but here we are in 2026 with the same mess.
Remote work merely exposed a much larger problem that had been accumulating for decades. Government expands but almost never contracts. An agency acquires another building, signs another lease, hires another department, and increases its budget. Once that expense becomes embedded in the bureaucracy, nobody wants to surrender it because bureaucracies measure success by how much money and authority they control.
The private sector cannot operate this way. If a corporation discovers that half its office space is unnecessary, somebody begins calculating how quickly the leases can be terminated. Every empty floor represents money that could have gone toward employees, investment, technology, shareholders, or customers.
The scale becomes staggering when you look beyond one department. The federal government controls roughly 277,000 buildings and structures worldwide and spends billions annually operating and maintaining federal property. GAO has classified federal real-property management as a “high-risk” area since 2003, 23 years ago, because agencies have struggled for decades with excess and underutilized property.
If the government has known since 2003 that this is a high-risk problem and taxpayers are still maintaining enormous quantities of underused space, then this is not an oversight. This is how bureaucracy functions. The GAO has previously examined federal headquarters buildings in Washington and found extraordinary underutilization. In one study of 24 agencies during early 2023, average building utilization was approximately 25%. Seventeen agencies were using an estimated 25% or less of their headquarters capacity.
The Forrestal Building is a perfect example of why this federal real-estate mess needs to end. The Department of Energy is supposed to leave the massive 1969 1.8 million square feet complex and consolidate into the much smaller Lyndon B. Johnson Building. GSA originally said getting DOE out of Forrestal would avoid more than $350 million in deferred maintenance, yet the latest GAO report says the disposal timeline and costs are now “in flux,” with disposal itself previously estimated at more than $300 million. Even more absurd, while Washington prepares to unload the building, DOE is spending an estimated $22 million to add 20,000 square feet of classified space inside it. The Forrestal Building has been discussed for disposal for well over a decade, yet taxpayers continue paying to maintain and improve an obsolete property the government already knows it needs to leave. This is precisely how Washington burns money: everyone agrees the building needs to go, but bureaucracy makes getting rid of it almost as expensive and complicated as keeping it.
Twenty-five percent. Imagine owning a 100-room hotel, regularly using 25 rooms, heating and maintaining all 100, employing people to secure the entire building, and then complaining that you need more revenue because expenses are too high. Nobody in the private sector would tolerate it. Yet taxpayers have been paying for exactly this mentality. This becomes even more absurd when you consider what has happened to the federal workforce. Since Trump returned to office, hundreds of thousands of federal positions have disappeared. The government therefore has fewer employees while still carrying an enormous real estate footprint accumulated during decades when Washington continuously expanded.
Of course, government will explain that selling property is complicated. There are regulations, security requirements, historic preservation rules, environmental reviews, relocation costs, union considerations, lease obligations, agency-specific requirements, and countless other bureaucratic obstacles. That explanation actually proves the point. Government created so many layers of rules governing itself that it cannot efficiently dispose of buildings it already knows it does not need. The federal government occupies an enormous amount of premium property in and around the nation’s capital. Some of these buildings sit on land worth tremendous amounts of money. A rational owner would constantly ask whether holding that property still makes financial sense.
This is why simply forcing federal employees back into offices does not necessarily solve the underlying problem either. If a building is unnecessary, forcing people to commute into it merely to justify its existence reverses the logic. You do not invent a reason to use an unnecessary asset. You dispose of the unnecessary asset.
The objective should be productivity. What service does the agency provide? How many people are required to provide it? How much physical space do those employees actually need? What does that space cost taxpayers? Could technology allow the same service to be delivered with fewer people, fewer buildings, or both? Those are normal questions in the private sector. In government, they become political warfare.
This is the same mentality we just saw with federal fraud. GAO estimates the government loses somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. Now GAO is simultaneously telling us that government agencies maintain enormous quantities of underused real estate.
The GAO has been warning about federal real estate for more than two decades. The government knows it has excess property. It knows many buildings are underused. It knows taxpayers spend billions maintaining this enormous portfolio. Before Washington builds another bureaucracy, perhaps it should figure out what to do with the buildings from the last one.
