While GSA and OMB touted at a Senate hearing the administration’s programs to freeze and then reduce the government’s real estate footprint, GAO cited its own conclusions that the claimed savings are “unreliable, resulting in a potential overstatement of the progress made to date.”
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was examining a long-running issue involving underused or unused property that incurs a cost to maintain, or that could yield revenue if sold—but that the government still struggles to sell off or even give away.
GAO said that an examination of data from four of the six agencies claiming the largest reductions in their footprint found that all four had overstated their actual space reductions. For each of them, at least one of the two largest reductions the agency claimed either was overstated or did not represent in a reduction in square footage at all.
Some of the reported reductions were due simply to the timing of the baseline for reporting; others had data errors or resulted only from re-measuring space, not actually reducing it; some actual reductions that occurred were the result of initiatives already under way when the administration announced its Freeze the Footprint policy; and still other properties that agencies claimed to have disposed of “were simply returned to GSA and remained part of the federal inventory,” GAO said.
“The federal government continues to rely heavily on leasing of properties where it would be more cost effective in the long run for the federal government to own,” it added.
