The General Services Administration (GSA) deals with many governmentwide concerns, including real estate and office space. For more than 20 years, auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have considered federal real property management a high-risk issue. GAO recently reiterated a list of recommendations for the GSA on real estate. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with GAO’s director of physical infrastructure issues, Heather Krause.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin The General Services Administration deals with many government-wide concerns including real estate and office space. For more than 20 years, though, auditors at the Government Accountability Office have considered federal Real Property Management a high-risk issue.  GAO recently reiterated a list of recommendations for the GSA about real estate. We get more now from the GAO is director of physical infrastructure issues. Heather Kraus. Heather, good to have you back.

Heather Krause Thank you, Tom.

Tom Temin And this is a restatement of some longstanding things, some of them going back to 2003, and so forth. Any new recommendations for let’s start there for GSA on managing real estate and property?

Heather Krause We have 27 outstanding recommendations to the GSA right now. And what this recent work did was highlight the five that are priority recommendations. And so among the ones, so you know, they actually closed two of our priority recommendations last year, and we had added (an) additional one this year. That recommendation is focused on looking at the deferred maintenance backlog and GSAs plans to address deferred maintenance backlog. You know, there’s about a $3.1 billion deferred maintenance and repair backlog in fiscal year 2022. And so, we found that GSA did not communicate in its budget documents the amount of funding or timeframes that it would take to address that backlog. And so they did take some steps to address, you know, and provide some information and their 2025 budget justification, (but) we’re still looking for some additional information on those funding amounts and timeframes. And that kind of information is really important to inform decisionmakers about how funding levels could affect GSA’s backlog and really help them evaluate the proposal GSA has to address that backlog.

Tom Temin And that backlog applies to federally-owned properties.

Heather Krause Correct. And I should add too…actually, I think I maybe misspoke. I think the other recommendation — that one was around a little bit longer — but the more recent one was on space utilization data. I guess, just to speak to that. I mean, again, across the board, these five recommendations are really to address, Tom, as you said, up front, where we have seen a real high-risk area for the federal government, which is addressing that federal management federal property portfolio. And so another recommendation we made here was to look at plans to share information on space utilization data. And so what we found, and what we’re looking for is — they’ve taken some steps to share broadleaf information on how agencies can collect or look at methods for identifying space utilization. And they’ve done some things to share that information, but really looking for them to continue to have a documented plan to ensure those efforts are publicized, including to those that do not use GSA space, or portfolio planning services. And so kind of making all agencies aware of the cost and benefits of the various methods and technologies for collecting space utilization data. That kind of information, again, would really help agencies identify cost effective methods for collecting that information, and really informing the kind of decisions on potential changes to their real estate footprints.

Tom Temin Right. But they need the cooperation of agencies though, don’t they? The occupants who are having trouble figuring out who’s going to be in the office, who is not. And what percentage of the time?

Heather Krause Yeah, I think what a lot of these recommendations do is improve that kind of data that’s needed to help agencies make those types of decisions. Again, coming back to that space utilization, how can agencies — so, like, GSA is looking to really work with agencies to figure out: what are tools and ways that they can better understand utilization so they can assess what are we using? What might be opportunities to dispose of property that’s unneeded.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Heather Kraus, Director of Physical infrastructure Issues at the GAO. And that idea of disposal of property. That’s something they talk about for decades at a time. And there are commissions and looks at properties. And sometimes after all of that, they find a garage somewhere they can tear down or sell. There’s a more fundamental issue, though, isn’t there?

Heather Krause Yeah, this disposing of unneeded property has been a long-standing challenge. Sort of managing the property and addressing issues of disposing unneeded property has been a long-standing issue. Another recommendation that we made to help address that was trying to get — again, as you point out, Tom, that there is federal agencies that are also involved in in making these decisions, but looking for GSA to develop a process to collect and share lessons learned from what they had was, which was a temporary approach for reducing the federal government’s real property inventory. So there was a law back in 2016 that set up a process for them to select and prepare unneeded federal properties for sale. The first couple rounds of process did face some setbacks and challenges in carrying it out. So what we’ve recommended, to improve that last round of the process as well as looking ahead, is having a mechanism or a process to share those lessons learned, leverage those stakeholders that were involved — their knowledge and addressing potential challenges with disposing of real property. That kind of sharing of information, I think will provide stakeholders, including the Congress, with insights on how, you know, the federal government might better dispose of its Israel property.

Tom Temin And of course, GSA leases, probably way more space than the government owns for occupancy by agencies. And did you find are there open recommendations on the leasing side of things? Besides the occupancy information?

Heather Krause We don’t have a leasing recommendation when it comes to something that’s priority. But I think, you know, we’re often looking at ways — again, I think key areas is improving that data to help, GSA and agencies make decisions on federal property. Another way that we found in our work to improve that was around the accuracy, completeness and usefulness of some of the street address information that you find in it’s public database. So you know, when we looked at that issue, again, lack of reliable data on federal assets is really one of the main reasons is federal property management’s on our high-risk list. And GSA has a publicly available database, you know, of their buildings, structures and lands. The public can take a look at that for any number of reasons, including finding property that they may be interested in leasing or purchasing from the federal government with a space that the government no longer needs. But when we looked at that there were numerous issues with the database which can reduce that kind of benefit that we’re looking for, from sharing that kind of information. So we made a recommendation, again, to improve that data. And GSA is collaborating with OMB on looking to provide guidance to agencies to help them improve the quality of the data, set up data quality programs. And what we’re looking for is them to follow through and working closely with OMB and federal property officials to complete those inter to other efforts to improve the data. Because that kind of reliable data will really increase its usefulness to the public, and really support that disposition of unneeded property.

Tom Temin And the street addresses. How is it? Do you suppose they don’t have accurate data on street addresses? I just looked it up. And they show the White House at 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue. Just kidding. But it seems like that would be kind of fundamental.

Heather Krause Some of it has to do with kind of formatting and incomplete information. And so, I think some of this is looking to ensure that there’s complete, accurate, you know, formatted information in those data databases to make it more reliable.

Tom Temin And in the 20 years, you’ve been developing these recommendations, and some of them get carried over from, you know, biannual report and so on. There have been a lot of building services administrators, commissioners, and a lot of administrators. Do you get the sense that GSA says, ‘Yeah, we agree, we got to get to this.’ Or what’s the response been?

Heather Krause The GSA has been very responsive to our recommendations. We have a way to measure progress of agencies. So we look back over recommendations made four years ago. And in the most recent report, we found that they had actually implemented 100% of the recommendations that we made four years ago. We have found it similarly in the recent years, they’ve had over 80%, or up to 100% in recent years, as well, of recommendations are implemented. So they are very responsive. I think it’s important to draw attention to the recommendations that we do in this particular report to ensure that we continue to make those types of improvements as we tackle this longstanding challenge of managing federal real property.

The post GSA gets a refreshed set of recommendations for dealing with real property first appeared on Federal News Network.

Federal workplaces aren’t what they used to be, not with a third or half of employees teleworking at least some part of the week. Since only a few people telework 100% of the time, that creates difficulties in managing office space. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with someone dealing with this issue, the Chief Administrative Officer of the Homeland Security Department’s Science and Technology Directorate, Margie Rowe.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin We know what the director of S&T does, science and technology. What does the administrative officer do?

Margie Rowe I take care of the facilities, the fleet, the mail, the personal property. Part of keeping and running.

Tom Temin And how have things changed from the pandemic to now? Well, let’s start with how things changed when the pandemic hit. And now we’re kind of halfway out of it in terms of people coming to work.

Margie Rowe When it hit, we went totally telework. I mean, it was part of keeping everyone safe. And out of that, we realized that we can work and be successful from our homes. So that was the impetus, along with the S1’s priorities for DHS to consolidate us down into fewer facilities and to reduce the footprint where possible. So as an operational component. But our operations are in our labs and in the field. We were able to reduce our footprint and now we’ve ended up here on campus.

Tom Temin So on an average day, if there are a thousand employees, what percentage, how many out of a thousand are coming in on a given day?

Margie Rowe On a given day here? About 10 to 15% come in across S&T. In our laboratory facilities, they’ve been coming in almost every day throughout the pandemic based on their work. Our work here, program managers, project managers, communications, facilities, IT a lot of that work can be done from home. So, we’ve been lucky and being able to stay at home.

Tom Temin Because there’s a big building here and lots of floor space, but you have reconfigured it such that it accommodates the fact that people only 15% of headquarters people are coming in. Tell us more about that.

Margie Rowe That was done when we moved. We moved out of Vermont Avenue and that was a large move. You know, everybody had their own office. Everybody had all cabinets of paper. So, we got people to go virtual, worked with CIO, installed Teams. So that allows us to do collaboration. And we reduced our footprint so that we do a reservation system. So, the executive front office has permanent location. And then the people you would want if you were coming to the building and you needed help, the facilities office, the CIO help desk, the security office, the personal property office, those people have space every day, all day, same location. Today I’m sitting in a cube that I normally sit in when I come in, make a reservation and just come in and bring your stuff with you every day and then take it home every night.

Tom Temin Now, decades ago, I edited trade newspapers for the government market, and we depended on mail coming in. Just out of curiosity, this just came into my head. What is the state of paper mail that comes to a government agency like this? Does anyone mail anything with a stamp on it to DHS anymore?

Margie Rowe You would be surprised. Yes, we have mail that comes in every day. It gets delivered to our receptionist area and then gets passed out to the various offices across S&T. If it looks important, you know, sometimes we’ll have receptionist will open it up, especially who it’s addressed to, and they’ll send an email, or they’ll place a call and say, you’ve got mail.

Tom Temin We don’t have people sorting big bins of mail and running it through the halls and bins anymore.

Margie Rowe We probably do. That is done on a DHS wide level. So, I just see when the mail guy comes to our portion of the building, but he is pushing a cart, one of those old-fashioned carts, and they hand you your mail.

Tom Temin Some things never change, I guess because I saw an in and out basket somewhere. I think that was FedEx.

Margie Rowe Yes, that was at the receptionist. We have incoming mail, outgoing mail, FedEx, UPS, U.S. mail.

Tom Temin And what about paper consumption with only again in this building or the headquarters, with only 15% of the people in, I imagine copying and stapling and distributing memos. That must be a fraction of what it was too.

Margie Rowe Yes. We did a large effort when we left Vermont Avenue. We did a large effort of digitizing our records. So, we’ve worked with NARA on official records and digitized and move things off. We had a lot of people that spent a lot of time standing at a copy scan machine, scanning things. So, we’ve reduced our records. It’s all now virtual. If we need official documents, wet signatures, those types of things. Our EXEC Sec office takes care of those official records. But everything else now, if you want it printed, you come into the office. And we do still have those people. They come in the day they’re here, they print, and they take it all home and read it on paper.

Tom Temin Yes. And you probably don’t have encouraging people to have printers at home.

Margie Rowe No, we’re not allowed to have printers at home. DHS work has to be done on a DHS computer or a DHS printer. So, you should not be printing at home.

Tom Temin Got it. And the other question I had was telephones because it used to be that telephones were location based, even desk based. And you know, you know, 703 – 695 is the Pentagon, etc., etc.. Now not so much. And sometimes nobody answers the phone. That’s officially on a website for government agency.

Margie Rowe The DHS number does go to a person and then they will route it. There’s a number for S&T which rings at our one reception desk. But like my office phone that was at VTA, it now rings through Microsoft Teams. And I have my cell phone. So, you know, I have two numbers that ring I have to answer them.

Tom Temin But there’s still a physical receptionist even in this day and age.

Margie Rowe There’s one. Yes. And she also does. Well, she, he it’s a rotating position. They do facility support as well because sometimes, you know, people come in, mail gets delivered. People have questions. They don’t know how to get to a conference room. They don’t know where a building is. So, you do have to have a person to answer those questions.

Tom Temin Do you ever get calls from Doctor Kusnezov, the director saying, I’m lonely here. Can we have some more people in the office?

Margie Rowe We don’t get calls. We usually get emails. You know, we had an all-hands-on Monday, so a lot of people came in. He luckily is very personable. So, you know, he’ll sit. He has a little lobby reception area. He’ll sit and read the paper, go through a magazine, talk to people. So, there’s always somebody here. As with most agencies, I’m assuming Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are big days, Mondays a little lonely, Fridays a little lonely.

Tom Temin So I would think for people that may have kids at home or noisy pets, it would be like a pleasure to come here because that cube farm was quiet, sedate. Some nice views if you want to get up and stretch.

Margie Rowe It can be yes on days when there’s nothing going on. Monday we had everyone in. It was loud because it was like, I haven’t seen you since the last time we were all here. But today, you know, we come in, we work, we use headphones and earbuds when we’re on calls and in meetings. And, you know, it’s nice to see people again.

Tom Temin Now, are you a science and technology person or are you a federal administrator type person?

Margie Rowe I’m an administrator.

Tom Temin And how long have you been doing this type of work?

Margie Rowe I’ve been doing this for 15 years.

Tom Temin So you were pre-pandemic. And it must be just a sea change for people that do. What you do is to keep agencies running kind of unseen in the background.

Margie Rowe Yes it was. And people didn’t realize everything we did because it was just getting done until you move. And then all of a sudden they’re like, wait, where’s this? One of the things we did to help with that is when we started the move process. I did a started out as monthly, then it went to weekly chat and I was on teams, staff logged on. We talked about the move, I answered questions, and one of the surprising things out of that is people know me. I don’t know who they are because on teams you don’t see when you’re presenting. I couldn’t see all 200 faces, so I saw no one and they all see me now and they’re like, hi. I’m like, oh, hi, how are you?

Tom Temin And you must have made some modifications. Since you are the chief administrative officer, you can’t just have open pantry, kitchen views and boxes of cornflakes in the background.

Margie Rowe True. Yes. I you know, we have the virtual background, so it always it always looks very nice. But here, you know, we do have something that’s just come up recently is now that we’re back in the office, all of those office etiquettes that you had, if you come in every day, you remember them. If you don’t come in every day, sometimes you might need to be reminded, take out your trash.

Tom Temin And have you had to remind people, say on teams, when it’s a small meeting, even there, there’s protocols such as like no bathrobes.

Margie Rowe And we haven’t had issues with dress. Although the fun thing is we have seen pets come across in the background. We’ve heard someone go, not now, mommy’s on teams. So, we do still have that happening.

Tom Temin But the government’s going to survive in this 15%, 30%, whatever hybrid mode you think.

Margie Rowe I think you will, but it all is really based on your job. You know, TSA and CBP, they have to be on the ground every day. If you’re an administrator, there’s a lot you can do from your home.

The post How Homeland Security Department’s Science and Technology Directorate is dealing with its telework-induced high-vacancy offices first appeared on Federal News Network.

Agencies are well on their way to reaching the Biden administration’s in-office goals for federal employees, but the Office of Management and Budget still plans to hold leaders accountable until they reach full compliance.

Based on conversations with federal leaders, agencies are roughly 80% of the way toward hitting the administration’s target for at least half of feds’ work hours being spent in the office, OMB Deputy Director for Management Jason Miller told House lawmakers Tuesday.

“We’ve been clear that our expectation is agencies are achieving at least 50%, while giving them flexibility for how to deliver,” Miller said during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing. “We’ll hold them accountable for that.”

That 80% figure comes about a year after OMB first directed agencies to increase in-office presence. An April 2023 memo intended to strike a balance between in-office work and telework, while giving agencies leeway to determine what that would look like in practice. But several committee Republicans appear to be growing impatient with what they view as too long of a timeline for returning federal employees to the office — and what they said is a lack of workforce data from OMB.

In particular, some committee members during Tuesday’s hearing questioned Miller on why White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’ pressure on agency leaders for in-office presence took place several years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It seems to me like COVID is ancient history right now,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said during the Oversight committee hearing Tuesday. “That email [from Zients], dated January 2024 — kind of recent — does it imply that things are going slower than your expectations?”

Echoing the stance that Zients has taken with agency heads, Miller said OMB expects agencies to completely follow through with implementing the 50% in-office presence — though he did not provide a specific deadline for implementation.

“The purpose of that approach was to strengthen teams and organizations, make sure that we had strong culture, make sure that we had innovative teams, make sure that we’re able to bring people on board,” Miller said during the hearing. At least half of federal employees never telework, as their job duties require them to be entirely on site, Miller added.

But in reaction to OMB’s return-to-office push, many federal employees as well as their unions have argued that telework is a crucial flexibility for strong federal recruitment and retention. They have repeatedly urged agencies to use lessons learned from the pandemic as a rationale to maintain higher telework levels — and not push a 50% return-to-office.

Office space concerns

In contrast, some Republican committee members said they believed a 50% in-office presence wasn’t a high enough goal. A few pointed to a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office, which revealed many agencies sitting at or below 25% capacity in their physical office spaces.

“For most of America, 50% would still seem like a low mark,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) said to Miller during the hearing. “I mean, granted, that would be progress compared to 25% … [but] we don’t have agencies coming to us and saying, ‘Well, we don’t need this building anymore, or we don’t need this office space, so we can reduce our budget here to make up for it there’ — so I would just encourage you to continue to work on that.”

GAO, though, has said the challenge of handling federal office space long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal property management has remained on GAO’s High Risk List since 2003. The underutilization of federal office space is a more complex issue than can’t be blamed solely on telework, GAO officials have said. In fact, by GAO’s calculations, even if an agency had 100% staff attendance, the office space it would still only be about two-thirds utilized.

The Public Buildings Reform Board has reported that agencies now have a “unique opportunity” to reinvest their budgets into more modern office amenities, if they’re able to sell or otherwise dispose of unneeded real estate.

During the hearing, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) encouraged OMB to follow suit of the private sector and look at ways to cut back on total office holdings by maintaining telework at least to some degree.

“The private sector sees the value in working from home, and so they’re capitalizing on that,” Lynch said. “They don’t need all this expensive space now … they’re operating more efficiently.”

Miller said the administration is heading in that direction with its efforts for agencies, but is still leaving room for adjustment later on, if needed.

“In crafting our governmentwide guidance, we have followed very closely the research and actions by the private sector,” Miller said. “Ultimately, we need to compete for talent … And right now, the research suggests that where we’re landing is the right answer. But of course, we’re going to be dynamic going forward.”

Additionally, Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) pointed to reports showing that remote work and telework help increase diversity in the federal workforce.

“The administration has a significant amount of leverage to promote changes in the workforce, making it more reflective for people of all backgrounds … for people who face all types of barriers, like access to transportation, taking care of an aging relative or having to pick up their children from school,” Brown said.

Frustrations over in-office, telework data

At the same time, several committee members voiced concerns about delays and backlogs in public-facing federal services, which Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he blames on telework.

“You can see the frustration on our side of the aisle because we don’t believe the federal government is any more efficient or productive with its new, wide-open telework policy,” Comer said. “[Caseworkers] have had significant difficulty getting people on the phone at the [Department of Veterans Affairs], at the IRS, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture — the agencies go on and on … It appears that’s because they have a lot of their workforce still working from home.”

In contrast, a large majority of federal employees themselves have said telework actually improves their performance, and has positive ripple effects on agency recruitment and retention. A recent Federal News Network survey showed that about two-thirds of feds said they’re more productive while working from home.

During the hearing, Comer once again doubled down on his push to get deeper telework data from OMB and other agencies — asking OMB for details on the number of teleworking employees across government, and how telework impacts productivity. Unsatisfied with OMB’s response, Comer said he doubted that agencies have the information on hand at all.

“No one says we’re totally opposed to telework — we just want to see data that shows it’s more efficient,” Comer said. “And I don’t think you all have that data.”

The Office of Personnel Management releases an annual telework report, detailing figures on how many federal employees are teleworking at each agency. And the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) offers additional data on federal telework.

But in Congress, the push for deeper data continues to intensify. OMB is nearing a congressional deadline from the fiscal 2024 appropriations package, which tells OMB to turn over all agencies’ return-to-office “action plans” by late June.

The post OMB holding agencies ‘accountable’ for 50% in-office presence first appeared on Federal News Network.

As agencies send their employees back to the office more regularly, some feds are showing up to work only to find a sea of near-empty cubicles waiting for them.

Despite an administrative push for more collaboration and “meaningful” work in the office, employees said in reality, many federal offices have limited or no physical spaces to effectively host team meetings or events.

“It is cubicle city,” wrote one respondent to Federal News Network’s recent survey of more than 6,300 current federal employees.

When it came to physical office space, the return-to-office survey’s results were split into nearly equal thirds. Employees’ responses had close to even numbers for those who found office space either sufficient, insufficient or somewhere in between.

With more employees coming into the office more often, some survey respondents said it’s been challenging to find the right type of space to work — or to have enough space in the first place. Others said their office arrangements aren’t adapted to or reflective of the changing needs of working in person.

“We don’t have great meeting spaces,” one survey respondent wrote. “I tried to meet with a coworker on my floor last week and we couldn’t connect to a larger screen because there were none provided. We had to work side by side on our laptops.”

Those with cubicle-style work arrangements in older federal buildings said the setup is distracting, especially for those who have now spent years getting accustomed to work-from-home arrangements. While working in cubicles, employees said they can often hear others’ conversations or calls — and that leads to lower productivity.

“It’s very distracting having to hear every program’s meeting — not to mention, when someone comes to work sick, it’s nerve-wracking,” one respondent wrote.

Another survey respondent wrote, “The new desk arrangements are uncomfortable and not helping me stay relaxed and focused at work. [There are] smaller cubicles [and] half walls, arranged so our backs are to everyone else.”

Some respondents expressed a desire for agencies’ office space setups to better align with the administrative goals of working in person. They said agencies should put more emphasis on collaborative, co-working spaces, rather than siloing off employees to complete individual work.

“I mostly wish that our offices had more team space, conference space [and] workshop space. That’s what we need,” one respondent wrote. “We don’t need butts in seats, we need space for engagement. That’s the only useful aspect of our offices.”

Balancing space with design after return-to-office

The return-to-office survey findings contrast with agencies’ efforts to create “core collaboration days,” which align employees’ in-office schedules so they’re working in person on the same days of the week. In the survey, results were relatively neutral on the impacts of those collaborative efforts.

Employees’ concerns over the functionality of office space come at the same time that agencies are struggling to reduce their physical footprint. A recent report from the Public Buildings Reform Board found that agencies have more office space than the federal workforce needs, and the cost of maintaining that space continues to rise.

But at the same time, the board said while selling or disposing of real estate they don’t need, agencies have a unique opportunity to reinvest their budgets in office spaces with modern amenities, which could improve staff morale.

The General Services Administration’s guiding principles for federal office space recognize that there’s still a need for office space, but that its purpose is shifting. Now, the focus is on making space for collaboration and connections amid a largely hybrid federal workforce.

GSA has been trying to address the functionality of office space through the creation of its Workplace Innovation Lab (WIL). Federal employees and teams can reserve space in the D.C.-area co-working space, which uses comfortable furniture, innovative conferencing layouts and technology that’s better primed for employee collaboration.

Some of the WIL’s workspaces, for example, include reconfigured cubicles intended for small team meetings rather than individual work.

Chuck Hardy, the chief architect at GSA, told Federal News Network in February that on the whole, agencies should ensure their workspaces are agile and flexible enough to address the current work environment, while also readying that space for possible changes in the future.

Resources, food options in and around the office

Beyond office space alone, employees said some resources are limited both in and near the office. For instance, in the return-to-office survey, feds said there aren’t enough affordable, healthy lunch options around some federal buildings. For some, federal cafeterias and vending machines leave much to be desired.

After returning to the office more often, more than half of survey respondents said food options were “insufficient.”

“The cafeteria is too expensive, and the food is less than adequate,” one survey respondent wrote. “The distance to grab food takes the majority of my lunch time. I’m unable to drive somewhere due to the lack of time — the distance to walk to my car and drive to the location and back.”

Other survey respondents said there were no food options nearby, period.

“Our office cafeteria has closed,” one respondent wrote. “To eat lunch, I must bring it from home or walk over a mile each way.”

Another respondent wrote, “food options within the building are non-existent. A large modern cafeteria has been shuttered for four years.”

By comparison, close to 80% survey respondents are finding the availability of office equipment, such as chairs and desks, as well as computers and other in-office technology, either somewhat or completely sufficient.

Some survey respondents, however, still raised concerns about shared spaces, as well as the use of hoteling, or desk-sharing. A couple respondents pointed out that if too many employees are present on a certain day, not everyone will be able to get their own desk.

In large part, the availability of space depends on the agency and the specific office building.

For example, one survey respondent wrote that “hoteling space is sufficient, though remote meetings are problematic and conference rooms are not where they need to be for successful hybrid meetings.”

But another respondent wrote that “hoteling space is very limited. Equipment at the hotel spaces is hit or miss. Some are pretty old.”

Still, some employees said regardless of the availability of resources or collaborative spaces in the office, they didn’t feel a desire or a need to report to work in person. Like the results of many return-to-office surveys, a majority of respondents said they are more productive while teleworking.

One respondent wrote, “There is nothing the office can provide me by way of equipment or amenities that are enticement enough to justify the commute or cost of commuting, when compared to the comforts provided by home.”

The post Survey: Back in the office, feds feel mixed on office space functionality first appeared on Federal News Network.

A lot of DoD facilities — from barracks to office buildings — are in pretty bad shape, and because of consistent maintenance shortfalls, things are generally getting worse. So as part of a new strategy for its bases, the department is trying a new approach, seeking permission from Congress to test a series of pilot projects that would demolish old buildings and consolidate the people who live and work in them into “livable communities.”

In a legislative proposal the department sent to Capitol Hill last week, officials asked to demonstrate the new demolition and consolidation ideas at five locations over the next three years, spending up to $25 million at each site. It would be one of the first large tests of the new Resilient and Healthy Defense Communities strategy the department announced in February.

“We’re working on three lines of effort to guide our infrastructure investments: adopting human centered requirements, optimizing our footprint, and transforming our portfolio management,” Brendan Owens the assistant secretary of Defense for energy, installations, and environment told the House Armed Services Committee this week. “The strategy will ensure that our spaces are healthy, safe, functional, resilient and enhance the quality of life and readiness of our service members, their families and the civilian workforce. Together, our efforts will drive changes across the Defense infrastructure enterprise and ensure that it is managed as a strategic asset to promote the well-being of our total force.”

As to the pilot program specifically, the basic idea is to use military construction funding to tear down smaller older buildings that have fallen into disrepair, and move their residents or employees into newer, larger facilities, built with modern standards and that cost a lot less to maintain.

Legal barriers

While that might sound fairly straightforward, Defense officials say that under existing law, it’s actually very hard to achieve, mainly because of how DoD’s budget is allocated and the Defense budgeting system’s strict controls over different colors of money.

As of now, for any military services to conduct that kind of facility realignment, they’d need to plan military construction (MILCON) funding to build the new facilities in one budget year, and then move the new tenants in once it’s done. But funding for the demolition of the old buildings would have to come separately, likely several years later, because MILCON money can’t be used to fund demolition projects.

Instead, that funding would have to come from operation and maintenance (O&M) funding — an extremely broad category that receives intense competition for immediate priorities each year.

Demolition already a large tool

That’s not to say demolition isn’t happening. Installation officials say it’s often the best way to solve the problem of older facilities becoming too expensive to maintain.

Ravi Chaudhary, the assistant secretary of the Air Force said his service is already increasing its demolition budget to help reduce its $46 billion backlog in facility maintenance.

“We’re going to get after this by reducing our inventory, and using privatization to reduce the denominator,” he said. “Privatization allows us to reduce that backlog, but we’re also roughly quadrupling our demolition spending from roughly $30 million a year to about $140 to 160 million per year [over the next five years].”

But as of now, those backlogs are growing across the services. That’s partly because of chronic underfunding in DoD’s facility sustainment, restoration and modernization (FSRM) accounts. The Pentagon’s current goal is to fund those accounts to 90% of the level that its models say is needed to keep facilities from deteriorating, but the military services routinely fall short of even that goal.

There is one large exception this year, however: military barracks, sometimes called “unaccompanied housing.” In the wake of a scathing GAO report on barracks conditions last year, each service is now funding barracks maintenance to 100% of their models’ funding requirement.

“The Army recognizes that we have a sizeable backlog of deferred maintenance needs for hundreds of thousands of buildings,” said Rachel Jacobson, the assistant secretary of the Army for energy, installations and environment. “This deferred maintenance, which emerged over the course of many years, has serious repercussions … Simply put, any increase in our inventory of poor and failing barracks for any reason is unacceptable and must be reversed. And barracks that are in good condition must stay that way. That is why the Army is requesting 100% of the funding required for barracks sustainment. We are also taking a number of steps to improve the soldier experience and new and renovated barracks, both in living spaces and communal areas.”

But even if the services manage to keep their barracks from degrading any further, across their broader portfolios, officials say they simply have more facilities than they can afford to maintain, and the issues aren’t limited to housing.

In the Marine Corps, for example, each building that houses division and battalion headquarters commands are now rated as in “poor” or “failing” condition.

“The majority of our infrastructure, whether barracks, utilities or public shipyards, is not in the shape it should be. As an institution, we have allowed these assets to degrade over time; we have accumulated and deferred significant risk and allowed the risk to accumulate and compound,” said Meredith Berger, the assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations and environment. “And the adversary always has a say, whether we’re talking about kinetics and components or water. We’ve seen increased external impacts that reduce our ability to be resilient and respond — with the emergent and urgent frequently overtaking the enduring importance in a constrained funding environment. No matter what the cause, the cost is readiness, and our sailors and Marines shoulder the consequences.”

The post Facing billions in facility backlogs, DoD looks to new pilot for ‘livable communities’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

Once people got over the shock of the Maryland bridge collapse, the long-term questions started to arise. Like, what about the nation’s supply chain, given that the Key Bridge is the entrance to an important shipping port. For analysis, The Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Dr. Philip Evers, University of Maryland supply chain management professor.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin What are the supply chain effects? I mean, everything I’ve heard seems to indicate that some automobile shipments will take longer in parts. But is there more to this port than that?

Philip Evers Well, the Port of Baltimore is a mid-sized port relative to other ports in the country. So the port is very important, in the region. But if you look on a national scale, it’s much smaller than a port like, Los Angeles, Long Beach or the Port of New York, New Jersey. So I see a lot of short term issues that arise. Long term, I don’t see major effects outside of the Central Maryland area.

Tom Temin Interesting. So any indications that we have yet. Shipping will return more than we’ll talk about the surface transportation, which is a much longer term effect, but it’ll take them probably months to get the pieces of metal and so forth out so ships can come and go. Fair to say?

Philip Evers Absolutely. But in that time, the freight that would be coming to Baltimore, could, for the most part, be easily diverted to another port.

Tom Temin Yes, because Florida has a couple of big shipping ports, too, right?

Philip Evers Well, there there are ports all up and down the the East Coast, recognized that practically every ship that goes to Baltimore passes in Norfolk. The Port of Virginia is right there. So again, there’s lots for most items, especially for containerized freight, such as the freight that was on the ship that had the incident. Those containers could be offloaded somewhere else. Some of the more specialized freight might be a little bit harder to handle in the short term.

Tom Temin So then again, outside of automobiles, then we don’t really know what is important to the rest of the world coming through Baltimore, because containers on a ship can have everything from computers to whiffle balls.

Philip Evers Sure, absolutely. And we’re kind of thinking about this in terms of imports, but there’s also the export activities. And that I think is going to have maybe a slightly larger effect. Port of Baltimore certainly, handles a lot of export automobiles, but they handle some other export products as well that might affect other places in the world.

Tom Temin For federal government supply chains. Yes, the government buys vehicles, but they buy all of these other commodities, a lot of military gear. It doesn’t seem like this would have that much effect on what the federal government is acquiring.

Philip Evers I can’t imagine that it would have that big of impact, obviously some secondary impacts, but I don’t think anything major.

Tom Temin Now the port will get cleaned up and operational, presumably long before the road over it gets put back together. And that is, as people locally know, part of the Baltimore Beltway, which is a circle, a complete circle. And so when you take out a segment of a circle, you can’t get from point A to point B without going backwards around the long way. What about surface transportation?

Philip Evers I think you hit on the main point. I think the longer term the big issue will be with surface transportation, not with ocean transportation. Because as you say, they will be able to clean once a search and rescue mission are finished. They’ll be able to get onto the removal of the debris in the water, but it’s going to take a long time for that bridge to get rebuilt. And if you think about it, there are four. Well, there were four interstate paths through Baltimore, the two tunnels, the bridge and the other side of the beltway. And now one of those is missing. The Key Bridge certainly handled the fewest automobiles of the four, but it handled a lot of trucking because the trucks that carry hazardous materials are not allowed to go through the tunnels. So that’s one thing that’s going to put more, possibly more trucks around the other side of the beltway jamming that up more.

Tom Temin And you can get off I-95 through Baltimore and go down to a short highway called 395. But within moments you are on narrow surface streets.

Philip Evers Exactly. So for long distance truckers, and of course, anyone driving, let’s say from DC to New York, you’re probably not going to do much of that cutting through the town.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Dr. Philip Evers. He’s associate professor of supply chain management at the University of Maryland’s business school. There’s a third mode here called rail and the Baltimore Tunnel coming out of the city, going south toward the East coast. That’s long been an object of attention because the bridge, it’s a really old tunnel, and the double piggyback containers that come off of ships sometimes can’t fit two up on a train and get through that tunnel. And wasn’t there infrastructure money at long last to rebuild that tunnel?

Philip Evers Yes. Some of the the very initial work on that is is starting to happen. There’s two tunnels in Baltimore. There’s the Amtrak tunnel, which is an extremely old tunnel, and there is now money and there’s now work progressing on that. And that’s at the very initial stages. There’s also the Howard Street Tunnel, which is a CSX, line. That’s freight only. But that line is now also being expanded, to allow for double stack.

Tom Temin Expanded, meaning they have to scoop it out bigger.

Philip Evers  Exactly.

Tom Temin And that’s not a minor engineering thing. I know you’re not an engineer, but that’s not a minor undertaking, is it?

Philip Evers No. In neither of those two tunnels, it cases is that minor. They’re both going to be major project. Much as I’ll point out, and you may recall in in DC, the Virginia Avenue tunnel expansion 10 or 15 years ago was a significant undertaking, but it was done relatively quickly.

Tom Temin And let me ask you about a bigger question. And that is people that are doing procurement on behalf of organizations, in our case, contracting officers. Shipping was something that you consider. Do you think that in the future shipping, shipping methods, shipping costs, shipping warranties should be a bigger part of the thinking of people that are trying to get things acquired and delivered?

Philip Evers Let me come at that in a slightly different perspective. One of the things that occurred during COVID was firms started to really think about the resiliency of their supply chain, especially after 2021. And there were all the problems on the West Coast, in L.A. and Long Beach, firms really started to take resiliency seriously. And so a lot of firms have started to put supply chain backup plans into place. Now we know that plans are always off, but at least firms are now starting to think about these things. So I think in this case, this would be really our first major experience with resiliency planning since firms have really started to kick around this idea. So I’m sure everything won’t go swimmingly, but it will give us experience and I think we will recover better and faster than had firms not been thinking about this to begin with.

Tom Temin And so probably the most critical aspect for the government might be military supplies and deliveries, which are often heavy items or coming by train or full size truck. Therefore, that resiliency would be something military acquisition people should be thinking about.

Philip Evers Sure. Now, again, I don’t know how much military cargo comes directly into a Baltimore.

Tom Temin Probably none.

Philip Evers Probably none. And again, Norfolk is right there. I don’t see this being as big of an impact on the military is more on the commercial side out of Baltimore.

The post Will that bridge collapse in Maryland affect federal supply chains? first appeared on Federal News Network.

The bills for facility maintenance that federal agencies have decided to put off until future years are ballooning. The Government Accountability Office looked at four big agencies: GSA, HHS, Interior and Energy. GAO found the collective size of their deferred maintenance backlogs grew 80% over just the past five years – and agencies have not done a great job of explaining the reasons to Congress. David Marroni is an acting director for physical infrastructure issues at GAO. He talked about the problems with Federal News Network’s Deputy Editor Jared Serbu on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. 

Interview Transcripts: 

Jared Serbu Okay, David. And I think I think the most obvious place to start is from what goes been able to determine what are some of the reasons behind these huge, huge increases in deferred maintenance expenses or estimates, I guess we should say.   

David Marroni Right. So there’s a number of reasons. Funding constraints as one agencies would, they don’t have enough funds to do while the repair and maintenance needs defer those repairs. So that’s one of the reasons for the increase. Also, as I think anyone knows who’s done a renovation in the past couple of years. Material and labor costs have increased substantially due to inflation, and that affects the deferred maintenance backlog to its terms, the size of that estimate. And then a third reason is simply that the vast size of these federal building and structure holdings, this is a large and aging portfolio. The average age is about 50 years of many of these buildings at this point. And older buildings just cost more to maintain and repair. They deteriorate more. And so that also contributes to the increase.   

Jared Serbu Yeah. And it seems like it’s really government wide. I know you really only looked at detail at four large agencies, but you also found, I think, a 58% increase government wide in these in these deferred maintenance expenses. It sounds like what you’re saying is there’s no like singular policy across the government that caused this. It’s a lot of economic factors and a lot of other things.   

David Marroni Yeah, that’s a fair take. It’s economic factors and then it’s just progressively increase in these maintenance backlogs over time for civilian agencies. This was focused on civilians, right?   

Jared Serbu How reliable can we say these estimates probably are? Because it seems like by definition this is work that wasn’t done. So I’m going to guess in a lot of cases, agencies really never went out to bid to get reliable cost estimates on what the work would have taken. So again, how reliable are these estimates?   

David Marroni So they’re reliable enough for accounting purposes, but that does not mean that when you actually conducted this project, it would be this exact number. So I think that the number we’re talking here about $80 billion of a deferred made up backlog. That’s a good estimate of where things stand. It may be higher what you got into the actual projects themselves, but this is reliable enough for accounting purposes.   

Jared Serbu And I want to dig into one of your other major findings was, which is that in their budget materials and other communications that Congress agencies need to be communicating more information about this deferred maintenance. What are they not telling Congress that they should be telling Congress?   

David Marroni So a couple of things. First, they are including information on what’s the you know, at a big level, what’s our deferred maintenance backlog, which is good, but they haven’t been explaining the reason for major changes from one year to the next, which is important context for Congress to understand. They also have not been including information on what is included in these numbers and what is it. So, for instance, in some cases you may have a building that isn’t the deferred means backlog, but you’re planning to get rid of it the next year. And so it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to invest in those repairs. But in the information being communicated to Congress, agencies aren’t being clear about what exactly is in that bucket or not. And then lastly, the agencies are not communicating what portion of the deferred means backlog is mission critical, Like what are the most important pieces of this backlog versus some things that might be less urgent? So those bits of information are important for Congress with this making funding decisions to really understand the full context of what these numbers be.   

Jared Serbu Right. And the consequences of those deferrals, I guess, would be one of the most important things you’d want to know, because there’s a big difference between a deferral that, you know, would prevent the failure of a building versus something that you can reasonably put off for a few years with no real consequences to Agencies have that kind of information that they could be sending to Congress.   

David Marroni Oh, they do. The agencies actually internally have a fairly good at least the agency’s looked at a fairly good process for prioritizing projects, understanding where they deferred maintenance, urgent, urgent needs are. So we’re simply saying, well, you should communicate that more wholly to Congress so they can understand as they’re making funding decisions.   

Jared Serbu And considering how long federal budget cycles normally take. I’m imagining that that sort of added information is probably not going to start showing up for a few years. Is that a fair expectation?   

David Marroni I think that’s a fair expectation. Obviously, we’re in the midst of the next budget cycle right now. So the agencies all accepted our recommendations, all agree with our recommendations. DoE said they were going to take a look. So hopefully by say FY26, we’ll start to see this information in the budget submissions.   

Jared Serbu There was a little bit of discussion in the report on using models. Can you go into that a little bit how our agency’s doing that? And does it seem to be effective?   

David Marroni Yes. So of the four agency we looked at, which were Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, Health and Human Services at GSA, only one had a fulsome model, GSA, which they use. And it’s an important tool. It allows them to say, okay, we have a number of deferred maintenance projects. Let’s use the model to find out what the best return of our investment would be. We have a limited number of funds. How can we get the most for our money using this model? The other agencies, two of them, had some modeling capability, but not a fulsome capability like GSA did. And the Department of the Interior didn’t use a model for this purpose. So we actually recommended that all three of those agencies take a look see the cost benefits of adopting this type of modeling, because we think it is a potential way to get some cost savings. Maximize the use of your resources to get these backlogs down. It’s just an important issue, both for mission reasons and for financial reasons. Right. If these structures aren’t holding up over time, it could affect their ability to do what the agencies need them to do. But in obviously for the fall government overall, these are large potential financial costs that are coming due. So important to get our arms around this now.  

The post A big uptick in federal agencies’ deferred facility maintenance backlogs first appeared on Federal News Network.

But first, federal websites. What’s the connection? Websites, like the J. Edgar Hoover building, require a lot of improvement or else replacement.

That’s a generic statement. In fact, every web site everywhere needs a lot of improvement. The better the website, the better your business’s or your agency’s customer experience. Web sites have in common with buildings the need for perpetual maintenance and improvement. As it grew functionally obsolete, the FBI building in Washington D.C. deteriorated physically. So, too, do websites come to the point of reckoning.

Federal Chief Information Officer Clare Martorana underscored websites and customer experience at ACT-IAC’s big annual conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania. She urged federal tech attendees to get back to the U.S. Web Design System. Hosted for a long time by the General Services Administration, the system states its own purpose right on the home page: “We make it easier to build accessible, mobile-friendly government websites.”

Martorana complained that too few federal sites have been optimized for mobile devices. And, she said, they’ve become fragmented to the point where, at least as some sites, a visitor can’t feel totally assured it’s the legitimate site of the agency.

As someone who visits dozens of federal sites each week, I can confirm they’re not perfect, but they hold their own in the vast sea of websites. A few are stellar.

And yes, while there’s always work to do on a web site, millions of people around the world live under governments that don’t care quite so exquisitely about customer experience.

I’m about to visit a couple of Southeast Asia countries, and I need a visa for one of them. You can only obtain one from the country’s “evisa” site, which looks as if it was designed in 2003 or so. Lots of picky rules about how to upload a picture of your passport, mug shot of yourself and fill in several pages of personal data.

Did I say picky?  No less than three times, I received an email that something was wrong. Each time, I’d correct the data field, only to get another email two days later that something else was wrong. Whomever or whatever was looking at the incoming applications seemed to look no further than the first error it encountered, rather than finding all the errors and issuing a single corrective bulletin. Better yet, do what the best contemporary sites do and not even accept the submission until everything is correct.

What should have taken two days extended to two weeks thanks to the crazy serial application examination system. My wife had even more problems, and it looks like we could jet off with only one of us having a visa.

Will they actually build a new FBI headquarters?

Greenbelt, Maryland. The FBI, if it actually moves there, would join NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a major federal installation. A big IRS center operates out of nearby New Carrolton, Maryland, so it’s not as if Maryland’s Prince George’s County (don’t call it “P-G”) is some sort of federal wasteland. It’s a rather nice area, actually.

The FBI will move there presuming the Virginia congressional delegation doesn’t throw up obstacles. Rep. Gerry Connolly, who’s eternally grumpy in a jovial sort of way, sounded particularly ill-humored after the decision. As Jory Heckman reported, Connolly issued this outburst: “GSA has shamelessly caved to political pressure, putting blatant politics over the merits and amending the weighting of long-established criteria to make this decision all but predictable.”

Politics can be brutal, especially blatant politics.

Connolly added, “GSA’s reputation for objective procurement free from politics has taken a mortal hit today from which it will struggle to recover for years into the future.”

That sounds like some tough hearings and budget fights for years into the future.  I’m taking a wild guess, though, that the GSA decision will ultimately stand, if only because people are getting tired of the argument. FBI will likely still have its training operation in Quantico, Virginia. The loss goes to Washington, D.C., and even that’s questionable, given the District’s strong condo and apartment market.

An idea: Replace the FBI building with a smart, good-looking new general purpose office building and move all the agency fragments scattered around D.C. into it.

The decision by GSA only kicks off a long process. Who knows, what if someone discovers a latter-day snail darter in Greenbelt? The environmental donnybrooks would take a decade.

Architectural and other critics have often declared the existing FBI building ugly. In the heart of downtown, it offers a cold shoulder to the public, being essentially a law enforcement headquarters with all the charm typical of police stations. Plus, it’s designed in the – wait for it – Brutalist style, which has earned the “ugly” sobriquet for the  Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development structures. An earlier column on that prompted a strong response from HHS that, well, they like their building.

If and when its new headquarters is completed, the FBI will certainly occupy a structure totally unlike the one where it now lives. HUD and HHS are going to be in their “ugly” buildings — designed by no less than Marcel Breuer himself — indefinitely.

But old, Brutalist buildings can get new leases on life, no pun intended. I recently visited my collegiate alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology. Back when I attended starting in 1973, it occupied about a dozen brick-clad Brutalist buildings constructed all at once in 1966, when the school moved out of downtown Rochester, New York. RIT still called it a new campus.

Now, the building housing, among other things, my photojournalism major is all new, inside. Gone is the ubiquitous smell of sodium hyposulfite, an odor that still provokes fond memories. It looks the same from the outside. But, gutted and redesigned for the digital era, the interior has become more open, airier and better lit than in the 1970s. It features more collaboration areas, outdoor patios, cafe spots and, of course, all of the technology that goes with digital imaging.

As Kamara Jones, HHS acting assistant secretary for public affairs, told me back in August, “If you don’t think the building’s beautiful on the outside, there are a lot of beautiful people and beautiful things happening on the inside.”

The FBI doesn’t call its J. Edgar Hoover headquarters Brutalist. It obliquely refers to the architecture thus: “It echoed a major architectural style of the 1960s.”

By the way, don’t go speculating on adjacent land just yet in Greenbelt. According to the FBI’s own account, the idea for a new FBI headquarters floated in 1939. Congress first appropriated money for design and engineering of the FBI building in 1962.

What happened next? Groundbreaking in 1967, five years later. Then came delays, arguments, strikes and cost overruns. The first cohort of employees moved in during June, 1974 — 12 years later after Congressional approval and 38 years after the idea.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

The first two female FBI recruits following J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘no women’ policy were Susan Lynn Roley, a Marine Corps lieutenant, and Joanne Pierce, a former nun.

Source: FBI.gov

The post New FBI headquarters? Don’t hold your breath first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Government Publishing Office this week confirmed its plans to maintain 100% telework and remote work options for all eligible agency employees — and plans to reorganize its regional office structure around that decision.

After conducting a pilot at its Chicago office, GPO rearranged all of its regional offices into seven different teams that are no longer tied to physical location.  Those team members, who are teleworking and working remotely, can work from anywhere in the country, GPO said in a press release Monday.

GPO, a small legislative branch agency with just a couple thousand employees who handle the government’s printing and publishing services, said the decision to restructure comes on the heels of major success teleworking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since early 2020, the eligible one-third of the agency’s workforce has been entirely teleworking.

GPO first implemented its current telework and remote work policy in July 2021, and now, the agency said that policy will remain intact for the some 500 telework-eligible feds at GPO. On the other hand, GPO production staff, roughly 1,000 employees total, will continue to work completely on-site, as these employees have to report in-person to produce U.S. passports and other printed materials for Congress, the White House and agencies.

“I believe if something is working well for our customers and teammates, we need to do more of it,” GPO Director Hugh Nathanial Halpern said in a press statement. “By vacating physical regional offices, GPO is able to better serve our customers, reduce costs and enhance the work-life balance for our teammates, all by refocusing our customer services teams on meeting our customers where they are, rather than where GPO is.”

Beyond keeping customers and employees satisfied, GPO Chief Communications Officer Gary Somerset said telework at the agency is saving $1 million annually in taxpayer dollars, since the agency is no longer renting physical office space for its regional teams.

More broadly, in a report last month, the Government Accountability Office found that agencies were, on average, utilizing just 25% of their headquarters offices. GAO officials said it’s time for agencies right now to start making “hard decisions” about how they’ll be using their office space in the future — and reduce that space as needed.

In contrast to GPO’s latest decision, many executive branch agencies have started announcing upcoming increases to their requirements for employees to work in the office. Federal News Network has compiled a running list of what we know so far about agencies’ return-to-office plans.

GPO is unlike other federal agencies, Somerset told Federal News Network. Consequently, the Office of Management and Budget memo from April does not apply to GPO. Still, the agency is continuing to measure productivity in its workforce, similar to executive branch agencies.

“GPO runs as a business, so our primary measurement of productivity is revenue,” Somerset said in an email.

The agency’s customer services business unit, for which all employees either fully telework or work remotely, has seen orders from agencies increase by about 15% in the last year. Somerset said the telework program is highly successful for handling the influx of orders.

“Productivity is up, our customers are happy, our employees are happy with the work-life balance and GPO can recruit nationwide for regional team job openings,” Somerset said.

Put simply, he said, “telework works for GPO.”

The post GPO vacates regional offices, embraces 100% telework for all eligible employees first appeared on Federal News Network.

Thanks to that extensive survey by the Government Accountability Office, we know just how empty federal offices really are. None of them is more than half full. That fact has depressed the market for certain commodities a lot of vendors counted on each year as a kind of annuity. To take a fuller look at the empty offices,  Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with sales and marketing consultant Larry Allen.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And we’re talking furniture, desks, that kind of stuff, which was always a good living for those that figured out how to sell it to the government.

Larry Allen Tom, these are things that are good livings for the people that sell them, whether it’s office furniture, whether it’s things like office supplies, multifunction devices, what we used to call printers, things of that nature. It’s a significant part of the federal market when you think about the fact that the federal furniture market’s a little over a billion dollars a year. It doesn’t always make headlines. But the old saying is that all adds up, right? And then when you particularly look into the office supply part of it that’s shrinking, know that’s got a socioeconomic part to it as well, because we’re talking about a lot of small businesses that do significant business with the government. But we’re also talking about the AbilityOne program, places like the National Industries for the Blind that traditionally are heavily invested in providing those commodity type office supplies and other things that make an office function. But if you’re not in that office or if you’re not in that office very much, then the market for those things is certainly going to be depressed.

Tom Temin Yes, I can remember when agencies like a lot of businesses went through a big process to consolidate everyone. So every manager didn’t have a printer in his or her office and they went to network printers. So it’s unlikely that the government is buying printers for everyone that is working from their house. They’ll say, Well, print the PDF if you want to print it, and otherwise you’re on your own for physical output. So it’s fair to say fewer printers are going in.

Larry Allen Well, that’s certainly right. And that’s the evidence that I’m hearing from some of the companies that I work with as that the demand for that type of product and the demand for print management services is on the decline. And when you look at the numbers, not just the vacancy numbers, which, as GAO pointed out, are pretty substantial, even if people are going back into the office, it’s probably only for two, maybe three days a week in many cases. So even when you’re there, you’re not printing out as much as you were. You can further consolidate that office space, which is kind of what GAO was saying, which means that you can do things like share desks, share workstations, so you don’t need to buy as many of them. You might need to buy some one-off stuff to keep everything current. But these large scale buys and again, they have ramifications outside of industry. Another mandatory source status for federal agencies that is in this areas, federal prison industries that for decades has made a significant part of its business selling office furniture to federal agencies. So there are a lot of things here that go beyond the mere vacancy issue.

Tom Temin Yes. The  AbilityOne, the federal prison industries, these have social value as well. And those people are simply not. I mean, the pens and all those supplies that came from the AbilityOne program that’s got to be way off.

Larry Allen You know, I think it is off. And there is a trend in that part of the  AbilityOne program, Tom, to get more into professional services. I think the statistics such as these are only going to hasten that transition into the provision of services. It’s definitely a different model for some of these organizations that are used to selling physical products. But the times are changing and people are going to need to keep pace.

Tom Temin Yeah, probably Amazon is the big beneficiary. If somebody wants that box of big sticks, it’s just easier to get it on Amazon for $3.99 than to figure out how to get it from your agency.

Larry Allen Right? Right. Well, I think we’re going to start to see some of the figures roll in here towards year end on GSA commercial platform initiative that Amazon, Overstock Government and Fisher Scientific are all part of. And I’m expecting that we’re going to have some pretty sizable increases in those sales numbers, Tom. And that could be this could be one reason why.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners. And there’s a lot going on on the scene. We are in the final quarter of the fiscal year. And so there’s a big buying to the extent that this year can produce a buying bonanza at all. And it’s all pretty much and we’re looking at Bloomberg numbers here, the big GWACs, the IDIQ contracts that are governmentwide.

Larry Allen Yeah, I thought this was really interesting, Tom. A few weeks ago, Bloomberg Government came out with initial projections showing that maybe 60% of all fourth quarter buys would go through a standing indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts, things like NIH’s CIO-SP program, the GSA schedules, NASA’s SEWP, what have you. And then they revise those numbers. Bloomberg came out just last week and said not 60, but maybe as much as 66%, two thirds of all Q4 spending going through these IDIQ vehicles. That’s pretty significant. I think some of the reasons for that are obvious. One, they’re fast and easy to use. Second, they’ve got easy competition features built into them. Third, there’s a substantial amount of small business presence on most of these IDIQs. And for agencies that are trying to meet their end of year small business use numbers and do it in a fast and cost effective way. IDIQ contracts just make sense.

Tom Temin And so that gives a clue to what vendors should be concentrating on, which is whatever vehicles you have existing. And forget about the new open competition starting fresh from scratch type of activity. If you want to have a chance of making your numbers this year, work your vehicles.

Larry Allen I think there’s a lot to that, Tom, and certainly there are always going to be open market procurements that the government does. That’s kind of the backbone of the system. But at fourth quarter, there simply isn’t enough time to start every new acquisition from scratch. You need to get yourself halfway through the process at least. And that’s another reason why IDIQ contracts are popular. So if you’re a contractor, you definitely want to have some of these contracts in your portfolio or at least work with companies that are partners that do so you can sell through them. Not every contract has that feature, but many of them do. You want to make sure that you know you’ve got your IDIQ channel tuned up and ready to go, because that’s clearly where the business is. That’s this year. And it was last year. Ironically, Tom, you and I have spent a fair amount of the time last several months talking about delays in getting new IDIQ contracts put in place. Most recently, that’s been on the GSA Polaris program and also NIH’s CIO-SP4. IDIQ contracts are popular. We know they drive business. This is proof positive of that. And yet because they’re so popular, companies are looking at this as a do or die. And the result is that the time it takes to put these new programs in place keeps expanding. So we’ll have to see if there’s some sort of a tipping point in the future that says these are great vehicles, but we can’t get new ones in place or we’re going to have to figure out something new. But for now, IDIQ contracts are certainly a very significant part of any company’s government business.

Tom Temin And briefly, I wanted to ask you about something else you’re commenting on this week. And that is what you call the two pronged compliance battlefront for contractors, including dealing with the Justice Department’s procurement collusion strike force, which sounds like, wow, they’re coming for me one way or another.

Larry Allen It kind of sounds like Darth Vader’s leading the procurement collusion strikeforce Tom. You can almost hear the Empire music playing in the background, but that’s just one prong that contractors need to be aware of in terms of compliance. Certainly the government’s tools, not just DOJ, but agency IGs, things like the Defense Contract Audit Agency, but you also need to look on the other side and sometimes the other side is in your own backyard or maybe in your back office. And that’s whistle blowers. The whistleblowers, typically disgruntled employees, former employees, even competitors. And I find that while there’s always a risk of audit for a contractor, a lot of the bigger False Claims Act cases and a lot of the ones that certainly in terms of the sheer number are initiated by whistleblowers. And so if you’re a contractor, you really have to pay attention to this two-front compliance battlefield. Yes, you need to make sure that everything’s squared away for the auditor when the auditor comes knocking. But you also need to make sure that you’ve got the processes in place for people to be heard, for complaints to be heard and processed so that people don’t feel like the only way out is to file a whistleblower complaint. So it’s both formal government and informal from your colleagues and industry. As always, I think compliance is pennies on the dollar, but you really do have to look at it as a two front war.

Tom Temin Yeah. And if a whistleblower comes to you first and says, hey we’re overcharging on this contract, take it seriously, look at it before you end up in a False Claims Act situation where you could have punitive damages.

Larry Allen It’s far easier, Tom, to address issues when they come up and as opposed to just letting them sit. It’s great to have money rolling in, but if you know or should have known that you were overbilling on a contract, somebody calls it to your attention and you do nothing about it, You’re kind of setting your company up for a multi-year entanglement with all kinds of the oversight community. Lost revenue, fines potentially to pay, legal bills to pay, and then even up to and including loss of key personnel. If you want to show people how you take these things seriously and prevent yourself from being suspended from doing future business.

 

The post Empty federal offices are bad for the economy first appeared on Federal News Network.

The space-to-occupancy ratio at agency headquarters has worsened in the last few years, as many agencies embraced hybrid work and increased telework for their employees.

It would be easy to blame underutilization of office space entirely on the spike in telework after the COVID-19 pandemic, but years of reports from the Government Accountability Office have shown that the problem is more complicated and long-term. Federal property management has been an issue for agencies for decades — and has remained on GAO’s High Risk List since 2003.

After surveying 24 agencies about their headquarters offices in D.C. between January and March this year, GAO’s preliminary results, published Thursday, showed every single one of them had excess space — and 17 of them were at or below 25% occupancy from staff members.

The new findings from GAO sparked heightened criticism from lawmakers on the House Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management Subcommittee.

“I’ve been a firm believer that if agencies aren’t using their space, they’ve got to give it up,” Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said during a subcommittee hearing Thursday. “We need to get a handle on this and push agencies … If they won’t do it, we’re going to have to help them do it. And I don’t mean help in the good way.”

The hearing Thursday followed after a subcommittee roundtable in March, when Perry said the growth of telework over the last several years meant agencies must “shed unneeded real estate.”

Now, GAO’s new numbers, coupled with a timely crossroads for agencies, present a “unique opportunity” to downsize federal office holdings imminently, said David Marroni, GAO’s acting director of physical infrastructure.

“It takes time to consolidate space, to dispose of space, so there is a tail to this as well, which is why decisions soon are important,” Marroni said during the subcommittee hearing Thursday. “We have a particular need now to refocus and potentially make some hard decisions about what space we need.”

Agencies have been holding onto too much space for years, Marroni said. Many decades-old headquarters buildings are not configured efficiently, and as technology has improved, agencies have fewer employees doing the work and less need for big offices, which has led to an increase in unused space.

“They have administrative spaces, storage spaces and some libraries that aren’t as relevant in modern workplaces, but that takes up the usability of your space,” Marroni later told Federal News Network.

Some subcommittee members pointed to the new GAO report as good reason to return federal employees to the office. Many agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, have already started announcing return-to-office plans, after the Biden administration in April called on agencies to submit updated work environment plans and increase in-office work where necessary.

OMB’s guidance is a key way for agencies to decide how much space they’ll need going forward, but Marroni said it’s not a full solution to the challenge of office holdings. Because of outdated configurations of office space, even if an agency had 100% attendance of staff assigned to a particular building on a given day, by GAO’s calculation, it would still only be about two-thirds utilized.

“It’s not just because of telework that we have these low levels of utilization, but it certainly has driven numbers lower than they were prior to the pandemic,” Marroni said. “There’s a particular opportunity right now to say, ‘How much attendance do we want staff in the building going forward? What does that mean for these spaces? Do we need all this space, or can we consolidate? Can we dispose of space we don’t need?’”

Still, many agencies have yet to make their return-to-office decisions, which leaves office holdings up in the air, too.

“The truth is, we’re still in the middle of this shift in the real estate market, and this could take a long time to play out — we need to recognize that,” Subcommittee Ranking Member Dina Titus (D-Nev.) said during the hearing. “But returning to work is only part of the issue at hand.”

The other part of the equation? More than 50% of the General Services Administration’s building leases will expire within the next five years. Even though it’s years away, agencies need to start making decisions now, Marroni said. Aside from how long it takes to get through the process, there are also significant financial, environmental and opportunity costs to holding onto too big of a physical footprint.

“Every dollar an agency spends on unneeded space is one dollar that can’t be used for other priorities,” Marroni said during the hearing. “How much economic benefit do buildings used at a quarter of their capacity really provide to the local economy? Housing, hotels and other uses could provide more local benefits.”

But at the same time, it’s not easy or cheap to work toward reducing the federal footprint, said Nina Albert, commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service.

“It does cost money to save money,” Albert said. “We need to move agencies from one location to another — that costs money. And where they’re moving to needs to be improved. Either in our own buildings, or into even a leased space, there’s improvements or changes that need to be made to the physical footprint to accommodate a new agency and how the new agency functions. All of those activities take money.”

To make it happen, Albert said GSA’s budget proposal will help modernize and fix the program. The fiscal 2024 budget request includes $2.3 billion for GSA’s capital program. Without stable funding, Albert said it forces the government to lease out of necessity, while still carrying space it no longer needs. She also emphasized the need to streamline GSA’s authority to maintain and dispose of real property.

“The expanded authority is not a request for additional funds,” Albert said. “Instead, the proposal allows GSA to use existing funds on analyses and activities that support agency identification and preparation of real property for disposition.”

Lawmakers also questioned the right capacity for federal office spaces, and whether there should be a set goal for agencies. There are no set standards for agencies to determine how much office space they need, but traditionally, GSA has maintained a benchmark of 180 square feet per staff member to measure the office space agencies will need.

“Especially now that we have a more hybrid work environment, those existing measures, even the 180 may not make sense going forward,” Marroni told the subcommittee members.

The Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB), created under the 2016 Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act, was created with the intention of fast-tracking the sale of excess federal properties, but the board is falling behind on its goals.

Though it was able to sell $194 million worth of properties, PBRB is still hundreds of millions below its targets. The board has since faced rejections from OMB of additional property sales, and lost quorum after two PBRB members vacated their positions at the end of 2021. PBRB regained quorum in November 2022, and is preparing its final round of recommendations before the board ends in December 2024.

And with return-to-office plans still undecided for many agencies, many have been reluctant to give up the space they already occupy.

For Marroni, the preliminary results from GAO were not surprising, but there is a bigger takeaway for agencies. To start downsizing, agencies should look at how much space they have, how many employees they’re expecting to come to the office and how often.

“The numbers themselves, they jump off the page, but we expected to find low utilization,” he said. “If you walk around the D.C. core, I don’t think that’s shocking to anyone. But the numbers do highlight … that we do have a utilization issue right now. It’s important for agencies to assess where things stand and assess where they want to go in the future.”

GAO plans to release more studies in the coming months, including one with recommendations for how agencies can more specifically address office space underutilization, and another looking at the effectiveness of telework for federal employees.

The post With most agency headquarters at 25% capacity, ‘hard decisions’ coming for federal office holdings first appeared on Federal News Network.

Over 150 lighthouses have been sold or transferred out of federal ownership since the implementation of the General Services Administration’s National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000.

The NHLPA allows for lighthouses to be transferred at no cost to federal agencies, state and local governments, nonprofit organizations and educational organizations. Lighthouses that are not transferred can be auctioned off to the general public.

GSA currently has five lighthouses in New England available for transfer, and is putting up four lighthouses for auction. Scroll through the gallery to see some of the lighthouses.

The post GSA’s ‘2023 lighthouse season’ features new lighthouses for sale first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Inspector General at Housing and Urban Development is boosting efforts to end sexual abuse and unsanitary conditions in HUD-backed housing. For details,  Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with HUD Inspector General Rae Oliver Davis.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And you’re doing a couple of things here. Let’s start with the sexual abuse. There was a horrifying case in public housing that the Justice Department just took care of. Tell us what happened. And is that in your sense, emblematic of what can happen in public housing?

Rae Oliver Davis Sure. Thank you for that question. We opened that matter in May of 2018, and it started out with just one agent and one victim. And we zeroed in on a New Jersey landlord. He had been receiving about $1.2 million in housing choice voucher HUD assistance annually. And what we discovered were allegations spanning about 15 years, allegations that included quid pro quo, sexual contact for rental assistance. If you do this, you can stay here. If you don’t do this, you might be evicted. Those sorts of things, pretty horrible conduct. We did work that with the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, you mentioned that, and they charged him in August of 2020. Then in March of 2021, the local New Jersey Union County prosecutors charged him with multiple counts of sexual assault and criminal sexual contact. So we had a number of things going on there. This resulted in a settlement, though, in about December of 2021 for $4.5 million, which is the biggest settlement DOJ had of this kind with this particular kind of conduct. About $4.3 million, Tom went back to the victims. And the big thing here, for my agency, is that this individual had to sell all of his properties. He had hundreds of units. He had divest himself of all of that. And he had to agree not to be a residential property landlord going forward.

Tom Temin All right. So that was a particularly egregious case. But do you have the sense that it’s not the only one?

Rae Oliver Davis Absolutely. And unfortunately, we do not believe it’s the only one. It’s hard to put numbers on these things, I think, precisely because it’s difficult for people to come forward. I think, maybe until now, HUD beneficiaries who had suffered at the hands of this kind of misconduct didn’t even know that there was any kind of recourse or that it was a crime or a violation of the Fair Housing Act. So that’s something we’re really trying to do, is get awareness out to the public on this. But when we talk to HUD, when we talk to DOJ, we talk to the locals, we all get a sense that this is unfortunately quite pervasive. I said that that last case started with one victim, but sometimes we get up to 60 victims. So it’s out there, it’s a thing. So we’re really trying to combat this terrible conduct.

Tom Temin And what are you doing from the IG standpoint to help combat this?

Rae Oliver Davis We are partnering with just about everyone. There’s something here for all of government. It’s kind of a whole of government approach, all hands on deck. For us, working with our DOJ partners, getting bad actors out of the program. That’s what we do best, that’s what we want to do here. Each of these victims could potentially also have a fair housing claim. They have to bring that within a year. So we definitely make sure they’re on that path to filing that with the department, that’s something HUD can do. We work with the state and locals on these misconduct, criminal sexual conduct cases. And frankly, these start out, they can almost be a he said she said sort of thing. But by the time we investigate them, and we’ve got 60 victims, we really boost the state case against these bad actors as well. We also are driving complaints to our hotline. Like I said, right now, we fear that we have people that don’t even know that this is a crime or something they can do anything about. So we’re really trying to get the word out that way.

Tom Temin And you have some public service ads running, too, right?

Rae Oliver Davis We do. We have some public service ads running. There’s a video of me, hopefully educating people about what to look for. If your maintenance worker said this to you, if your landlord did this, just really educating potential victims on the conduct that we’re aiming to target.

Tom Temin And what about the HUD housing program officers themselves that actually do the payouts certify the landlords and run these programs?

Rae Oliver Davis Well, certainly that’s a good question. And we’re always looking to do oversight there. And this really is something where if we can get a conviction, if we can get a settlement like we had in that New Jersey case, we would then refer them for disbarment. So they wouldn’t be able to participate in any HUD or government programs going forward. That’s something we would work together with HUD to do.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Rae Oliver Davis. She is inspector general of Housing and Urban Development. And let me ask you about the other matter that you are concentrating on, and that is substandard conditions. I guess there’s still lead paint, even this many years after no lead paint in the market, and other problems with housing that are physical in nature and make for unsanitary, unhealthy conditions. What’s the extent of that and what are you doing about it?

Rae Oliver Davis Well, Tom, you hit the nail on the head and you listen to the news like I do. We hear every day about landlords who don’t hold up their end of the bargain. They get the housing assistance payments, but they’re not providing safe sanitary housing. It’s a big problem. Housing stock is old. There’s a capital needs backlog, I think you and I have talked about this before that contributes to the problem. The age of the housing stock contributes to the fact that there still could be lead in the property. So there’s a lot to do here. We are using our entire toolkit to really look at unit conditions on every level. We’re certainly looking at HUD oversight of the department itself. We’re looking at the inspection process. You and I think it talked about the [Real Estate Assessment Center (REAC)] inspection process before, that’s the main tool for looking at unit conditions. It’s been flawed for a while. It’s pretty complex. HUD has been looking to revamp it with new standards. There was a bit of a backlog during the pandemic. So we’re doing oversight there. We’re seeing how that implementation of the new standards are going, and have they really been able to attack the backlog and look at unit conditions in a timely manner? We’re looking at [Rental Assistance Demonstrations (RAD)] conversions, that’s been the department’s answer to aging public housing stock, give them access to equity, and perhaps the conditions will improve. We’re going to look at, are the conditions actually improving and certain rental assistance demonstration properties. We’re also looking at emergency health and safety issues. The timeline there is usually 24 hours to address those, we’re looking to see if HUD’s doing proper oversight of that. And then we’re doing targeted reviews beyond the HUD and program level. And we’re looking at entities. We see all the time HUD will finally abate a contract and basically have a landlord exit the program and they have to relocate tenants. So we’re doing some target reviews there as well.

Rae Oliver Davis And you mentioned Lead, absolutely. We’re looking at Lead from the HUD perspective. Does Lead have a plan for holding [Public Housing Agency (PHA’s)] accountable? Are they making sure the Lead-safe housing rule is being enforced? And then we’re looking at high risk properties? We’re looking at the Philadelphia Public Housing Authority. We just did an audit there where we found they didn’t have any documentation whatsoever pre 2019 on lead disclosure. So we couldn’t say for sure whether tenants were even being notified there were lead in the property. So for us, the big takeaway here is if you don’t have the right controls at the program level, at the partnership level, so the participant level, then that leaves you vulnerable to bad actors. So that’s where we come in, it’s another part of our toolkit. We just had a case in Indiana where a contractor took hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for doing repairs and renovations, didn’t ensure that any of that was done with, let’s say, practices in mind. And we already had a child in that unit with lead blood poisoning. So we’re doing things like that as well.

Tom Temin Do you also look into the finances of operators of this housing, to understand, is what they’re getting sufficient? Is there money left over? Do they put away capital expenditures such that they can maintain the properties? Because often, rent controlled types of properties tend to be often the least cared for.

Rae Oliver Davis That is something we were discussing everyday, Tom, and it’s a really good question. For instance, like I mentioned, a property in Pepper Tree right now where we’re doing some research. So we haven’t actually opened anything there, but we’re looking at what happened there. We have properties that just aren’t being maintained. So what’s happening to the funding around that? And we’re looking at how is HUD overseeing that as well? Are they looking at the financials? So often with these RAD conversions, they have to put forward a financial plan. So what happens there? How is that successful? How is it not.

Tom Temin A RAD conversion means what? Rental assistance Demonstration.

Rae Oliver Davis Well, it’s really complex. There are many different avenues for RAD, but essentially it’s the answer to this capital needs backlog and public housing. So it could be a public housing authority that wants to convert to RAD. There are other properties that convert to RAD too, but essentially it’s the answer to getting the properties back in better shape and better condition.

Tom Temin It doesn’t turn them into condos or anything like that.

Rae Oliver Davis I am not aware of it turning over to condos. But like I said, it’s really complex and there are many different avenues.

Tom Temin All right. And while the IG is doing all of this investigative work, again, I have to ask, where are the housing program people in HUD, outside of the IG’s office, but in the HUD program offices?

Rae Oliver Davis These are good questions, and I’ve cited several examples of our oversight of HUD in these areas. And a couple of things. First of all, we just partnered with HUD, we did a civil remedy against a landlord for $1.2 million. That’s a good partnership for us to do with HUD. I want to see more of that. I want to push for more of that. We’re going to commit those resources. I have to say, there are areas where HUD still could improve lead compliance. I cited several examples there. We really want them to be able track lead in the housing authorities. But to be fair, Tom, there’s 3300 housing authorities. So we have to talk about the capacity of HUD. In order to carry out their mission, they have to deal with tens of thousands of partnerships, and they have to do oversight of those partnerships. So we have to acknowledge the capacity issue there as well. There’s some areas, where I should point out has made progress. When we talk about lead and hazards, that’s not the only hazard. We have contaminated sites, we’ve done work around that before. They have a plan in place now to assess properties who are close to contaminated sites and do environmental reviews, that’s because of our recommendations and our work. They’re very close to a departmental wide policy on radon, something that would address testing and mitigation where they find radon, that’s also part of one of our evaluations. So there’s some areas where they’ve made strides, certainly.

Tom Temin And I guess, just getting back to the lead paint, because it’s emblematic of this. The fact that lead paint was banned, I think, more than 40 years ago. That’s testimony to the age of a lot of the public housing. And if there are still lead paint there that attests to the lack of capital investment in it, if you still have window panes and window sills that have lead paint on them.

Rae Oliver Davis That’s right. That’s absolutely right. We find that lead dust, lead paint chips is definitely one of the vulnerabilities when it comes to having children in public housing. And the old stock, certainly.

Tom Temin And then you’re also getting some wind in the sales from Congress, it looks like, for these efforts. There was a hearing not long ago.

Rae Oliver Davis Oh, absolutely. Yes, they did a hearing. And we get questions from our congressional stakeholders all the time about this. I just had a hearing on the Hill in advance of the secretary’s budget hearing, and I got questions about these issues. Yes, all these initiatives.

Tom Temin So it’s ongoing, no end really in sight.

Rae Oliver Davis We’re going to keep putting resources to it. One of the things we hope to see, especially in the sexual misconduct area, is deterrence, that’s a win for us, too. I think, initially with these PSA’s and its focus, we hope to see more complaints, more people coming forward because we want to raise awareness where maybe there hasn’t been. But in the long run, we’ll be doing data analytics, will be seeing where to commit our resources. But deterrence is also a win for us, definitely, especially in the sexual harassment arena.

Tom Temin And by the way, do you ever do site visits?

Rae Oliver Davis We do. That’s an important part of the process. A few years ago, we did kind of a systematic review in certain cities of housing conditions. I mentioned a few audits that were in the process of launching, those will be boots on the ground. When I say we’re going to look at the unit conditions, we’re going to go out and look at the unit conditions. That’s definitely what we’re going to do. We don’t do the inspections, that is a HUD REAC inspire inspection process. That’s not us. But certainly, in conjunction with our oversight work being on site, seeing what there is to see, talking to people is certainly very important.

The post HUD’s inspector general takes on two of the worst public housing problems first appeared on Federal News Network.

The future look and feel of your office space isn’t just going to be filled with movable furniture or whiz-bang technology. It likely will include federal employees from other agencies.

The latest trend the General Services Administration is hearing from agencies is the desire to share buildings, conference space and training rooms as a part of reducing costs and improving the employee experience.

Nina Albert, the commissioner of the Public Building Service at GSA, said federal office space will continue to evolve over the next few years as more agencies get a better handle on their short and long-term needs.

“Agencies are willing and interested in having the conversation about when is the appropriate time to share space? What types of spaces are you willing to share?” Albert said in an interview with Federal News Network after speaking at the Shared Services Summit sponsored by ACT-IAC and the Shared Services Leadership Coalition on Tuesday. “We’re engaging with agencies on those topics. There’s no clear decisions yet. But I just think about conference space that’s going to be of greater need in the future as people pull their teams together in off sites, or what we’re now calling on sites. Those types of conference spaces are in high demand, so are those the right types of spaces to be sharing? There’s other kinds of spaces like training labs that agencies could be sharing too, and as a result, they could garner some additional space efficiency. I think everyone’s looking for that now.”

Albert said the sharing of space could mean having multiple agencies in the same building, but on different floors. Or it could mean having a small number of employees from different agencies working on the same floor, but in different office space.

GSA believes it has a huge opportunity to help agencies and employees save money, whether around consolidating office space or reducing the commute time of employees when they do go into the office. GSA owns or leases office space in 2,200 communities around the country.

At the same time, approximately 50% of GSA’s lease portfolio is expiring in the next five years, putting some additional urgency on top of these plans.

Agencies submitted their office space plans to the Office of Management and Budget in December detailing their needs through 2028. OMB, however, has not publicly released those agency plans.

Workplace 2030 continues to evolve

Albert said GSA is meeting with agencies at least two years before their leases are set to expire to understand their needs and begin developing plans for the office space.

“We really work with them to determine what their longer term needs are, whether we should be reupping or taking on a new lease, or what we’re trying to promote as reuse or use of our existing federal space to consolidate those leases, and you’re seeing that activity, it’s really what I call blocking and tackling,” she said. “The model that’s becoming interesting to agencies is what I’ll call federal co-working, which is, in fact, shared space, where we would have all the amenities of flexible space in one suite. Maybe multiple agencies who only have a small team, for example, in city X, and they still want to have access to the safety, security and access to an office, but they don’t need an entire suite to themselves. They’re willing to share with another agency that might also have a small team need.”

Albert said a lot of these discussions about trends and federalwide needs has driven conversations in the Federal Real Property Council as well as through GSA’s own Workplace 2030 initiative. The council is focused more broadly on federal real property that includes land, science labs and warehouse space. The Workplace 2030 initiative, launched during the pandemic, is more focused on the future of office space.

Part of the Workplace 2030 initiative is GSA’s Workplace Innovation Lab, launched in January, to let federal agencies and others test out new and different approaches to configuring office space.

“We have a backlog, I think of about 120 tours, with different agencies wanting to come and see the lab. It’s not limited to the federal government. This is the first workplace innovation lab of its kind in the country so we’re seeing private sector partners wanting to come and take a look at it and see what we’re doing. We’re also hosting other governments to come and check it out,” Albert said. “Why are they so excited about it? I think it’s because people really want to understand how flexibility is manifesting in space. Usually, when you’re building out real estate, there’s something fixed about it. The furniture manufacturers and the technology, providers are all really trying to figure out how do you build in as much flexibility as possible because we know that the next several years are going to require that?”

Asking for extra funding

Albert said GSA will continue to showcase these new furniture and technology configurations as well as closely watch its six-month pilot around federal co-working space at the innovation lab and at two other sites around the country.

She said the six-month pilot is “what we’re really testing for to see what the demand, the interest, and the need would be for that kind of space because I think that that could be a truly innovative approach for federal real estate in the future.”

A key piece to the future of federal office space is a legislative proposal GSA submitted as part of its fiscal 2024 budget request.

Albert said GSA is asking Congress to give GSA full access to the Federal Buildings Fund and to increase GSA’s prospectus threshold from $3.5 million to $10 million.

“That would allow us to save two years’ worth of process time, as well as $50 million a year in cost, just based on process alone,” Albert said. “A lot of the conversations that we have are really about how GSA is getting access to the Federal Buildings Fund, how that would support agency moves, consolidations and facility modernizations, which is really important because we have a lot of deferred maintenance problems that we’re dealing with. All of these consolidation opportunities are really reliant on our getting full access to the Federal Buildings Funds.”

The post Agencies coming around to sharing office space as future plans come into focus first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Mayor of the District of Columbia recently urged the federal government to get its people back in their offices or give up millions of square feet. The city has ambitious economic goals that could, in its view, make better use of the space. For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with John Falcicchio, D.C.’s deputy mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And just maybe, if you would, zero in with more detail on what the city would have in mind potentially for, I guess, mostly the leased space that the federal government now occupies. That is to say, pays rent on but doesn’t have any people populating.

John Falcicchio Absolutely. So first and foremost, our ask is for the administration to bring federal government workers back, and do so by having an enterprise wide policy on return to office. So Mayor Bowser is a chief executive herself. She has 37,000 employees. During the pandemic, 40% of those employees were in-person. They had to do their work in person. So that means 60% of her 37,000 person workforce, is able to have a flexible work schedule. And what we’ve done is we’ve set enterprise-wide, three days in the office and up to two days of telework. What we want the federal government to do is have a similar enterprise wide policy, so that every agency isn’t trying to leave it to itself. Now what we know, is that the federal government hasn’t brought people back in the same way that we have. And so that leaves a lot of office space, that isn’t being utilized, that we can either utilize ourselves, work with nonprofits to fill it. And so we get that vibrancy, that you would have, in having more workers in the office.

Tom Temin Right. There’s a couple of issues. One is the space itself, that could be repurposed for the types of businesses and nonprofits you want to kind of engender in the city. And the other is the street traffic itself, with the food vans and the small restaurants. It’s kind of a wasteland, in many ways in some stretches, because there’s nobody to have breakfast and lunch at these places.

John Falcicchio Well, we know that the federal government, in our central business district, accounts for 25% of the office space. Whether that’s owned or leased. And when you think about having that much of the economy sit on the sidelines, it does have an impact on our businesses and our small businesses. And that really has an impact on the number of D.C. residents and residents from the region that they can hire. So for us, this isn’t about just seeing if we get workers back in the office, for the sense that they should be working in the office. We do think it’s a better environment, more collaborative when people are working together. But really, it also has an impact on those small businesses and those frontline workers. During the pandemic, we said, we’re all in this together, we’ll get through it together. And now it seems that we’re through it. We’re saying to folks, well, you get back to work and we’re going to kind of hang back and work from home.

Tom Temin And do we have any statistics on small business closures or how many fewer restaurants or any kind of metrics on that particular issue?

John Falcicchio Yes. So in the District of Columbia, before the pandemic, there were about 800,000 jobs. That’s total, 800,000 jobs. And because of the pandemic, we dropped to about 712,000. Now we’re actually cresting about 775,000 jobs. So we’ve almost made back all the jobs that we lost during the pandemic. But what we know is that the jobs that are still missing, in the city, are primarily in hospitality, food service and attraction. And so what we’ve seen is tourism bounce back with the leisure traveler coming back. But we don’t see that same activity in the business traveler. And that business traveler isn’t coming back, because the economy in the district is dominated by the federal government. And so we need the federal government to come back to draw back that business traveler as well. That will help our small businesses and help our small businesses employ more D.C. residents and residents from around the region.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with John Falcicchio. He is deputy mayor for Planning and Economic Development for the District of Columbia. And when having these discussions or urging the government, who do you talk to? Because that is a highly decentralized decision, from what I understand.

John Falcicchio So far it is. But the federal government also has ways to implement government wide policy. And so we talk to partners at the Office of Budget Management, Office of Personnel Management, [General Services Administration (GSA)], because those are really kind of the three organizations propensities that will help the president make this decision. And so what we’re really asking for, is that enterprise wide policy that makes it clear for agencies. Now, even with our policy in the District of Columbia government, the policy again, three days in the office, up to two days work from home. Each agency director is allowed to implement that in the way that they can still carry out their mission, but give workers flexibility. So the better normal that we’re all hoping for, after the pandemic, can still be realized by bringing people back. We don’t need everyone to come back all the time, but we do need them to come back most of the time.

Tom Temin And what is your sense of how the government compares to the other big occupiers of D.C. space? And I’m thinking primarily of law firms. There’s a few of those down there. And then also, the big non-profits, the [American Enterprise Institue (AEI’s)], the Cato’s, the ones that occupy big buildings, the Brookings, those kinds of groups.

John Falcicchio Yeah. So over the last couple of months, we’ve actually seen a couple of indicators that show that there is activity happening. So we track that in metro ridership, whether it’s rail or bus. We also have some indicators of office utilization, and that’s kind of ticked up over the course of the fall and into the albeit mild winter that we’ve had been experiencing. And so really what’s missing is, that rush of people that can only come back if there’s an enterprise wide policy by the federal government.

Tom Temin Got it. And just a quick question on the number of job, you say you’re cresting around 775,000. The population is around 700,000, I think. So, do we know how many of that come and go? Because you don’t have 725,000 to send on the city every day. What’s the number that balloon in and out each afternoon?

John Falcicchio Yeah. So pre-pandemic we actually, of all major American cities, we were the one that grew by the most during the day, per capita. And we really need to experience that again, in order to realize our economic potential. And so the federal government could be a big partner in that by bringing workers home. And really, what we’ve heard from, we’ve heard from some of our partners in labor. Labor unions who represent office cleaners and office security officials and others who are in that space, real frontline workers. And they’re being impacted by fewer office workers coming back.

Tom Temin Yes in fact, the [Service Employees International Union (SEIU)] itself, to name a few, to name one of a few, has a really big building in the district. And those are not the people they represent that work in that building. I wonder what their population day-to-day is of people in there versus their teleworkers. Do we know?

John Falcicchio Yeah. So I don’t have that data in front of me. But what I do know is one of the things that, kind of going back to what the mayor said in her inaugural address, was that there is an opportunity to for us not just to talk about bringing folks back. But if folks are not going to come back and there’s less federal office space needed, we have a great opportunity to partner with the federal government, like we have on big real estate projects. Like Saint Elizabeth’s and Walter Reed and Hill East, to do kind of a scatter sight approach across our downtown to take sites that are underutilized and bring them back to productive use.

Tom Temin Yeah, like the southwest too, that area.

John Falcicchio Yeah. And one of the sites, and I know this is a site of contention in the region, but where the FBI lands. Wherever it lands, and it seems like it’ll land in Maryland or Virginia, with an executive office being here in Washington, D.C. That tract of land on Pennsylvania Avenue, creates a great opportunity for us to do a mixed use development with our partners in the federal government and draw more residents downtown. One of the mayor’s goals in her comeback plan is to attract 15,000 more residents to the downtown to make it more viable.

Tom Temin Yeah, because right now that FBI headquarters, the way it’s situated, you’ve probably walked by that building, as I have. And in the winter, it’s like walking in Pyongyang. It’s just an empty, windswept, forbidding place with concrete rising on either side.

John Falcicchio Well, we are just a few blocks away from the FBI headquarters. And one thing I will tell you is that it does seem that a lot of their folks are in the office and working. I know it, because I see them at the lunch counter often, and they make the lines a little bit longer because they come back. That’s the kind of leadership we need to see of the federal government agencies. And a lot of that, I think, is because that’s a mission that you can’t carry out by everybody being separate. You got to bring people back together to collaborate, to work together, to mentor. And that’s what we think more federal government agencies should do.

Tom Temin And what about traffic and automobile movement? I know everyone has this great ideal of green inner cities, but the fact is, lots of people drive down and it’s getting tougher to get through some of these areas. Even the outlying counties are taking some of these measures. And that really mitigates for people to stay home.

John Falcicchio Yes. What we’ve seen is some utilization actually, of our bus is starting to come back. Actually, it’s at about 77% of pre-pandemic levels, where we see a lack of ridership is on the Metrorail. So we’ve got to do more to attract riders back to Metrorail. That will help us with the traffic issue. The other thing is that Metro is doing a great job over the last few weeks of bringing more cars into service and that allows them to run more frequent service. And so as that progresses, we think that the riders will come back as well.

Tom Temin No chance of bringing back 14th and a half street.

John Falcicchio So we think, we got to get more people onto Metrorail. That’s the best way to kind of take some pressure off the roadways.

 

The post Why the District of Columbia wants the federal government to fish or cut bait first appeared on Federal News Network.