The General Services Administration, the landlord for much of the federal government, says none of the owned or leased buildings it has data on meet the minimum occupancy standard set by law last year.

Under the USE IT Act that former President Joe Biden signed in his final weeks in office, agencies must be able to show that their buildings meet at least a 60% utilization rate, or come up with plans to downsize their office space.

GSA published its first governmentwide snapshot of federal building utilization data on Tuesday. The USE IT Act requires the 24 largest agencies to share building utilization data with GSA.

The data shows that none of the more than 9,700 buildings are meeting the 60% utilization threshold under the USE IT Act.

The data published by GSA doesn’t include the Defense Department, which is one of the largest holders of real estate in the federal government, with over 700,000 facilites worldwide.  It also doesn’t include the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration dismantled last year. 

GSA owns and leases over 363 million square feet of space in more than 8,300 buildings. Last year, GSA leaders sought to cut its real estate portfolio in half.

A GSA spokesperson confirmed that “none of the buildings meet the 60% threshold.”

GSA wrote in a press release that “while this initial data remains imperfect, it is a necessary step that will allow us to continue to refine the methodology and consistently measure the space while bringing transparency and federal accountability to the forefront.”

The Trump administration is citing low occupancy and a multi-billion-dollar backlog of maintenance and repair projects as justification for moving several agencies out of their headquarters buildings.

So far, it has announced plans to sell headquarters buildings for the Agriculture Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The FBI is also moving out of its headquarters building and relocating to the nearby Ronald Reagan Building, which already provides office space for several other agencies.

Last week, the Education Department announced it will move out of its headquarters, the Lyndon B. Johnson building, by August and transfer employees to a building that previously held USAID employees.

The Energy Department will move out of its headquarters, the James Forrestal building, and relocate staff to the Education Department’s headquarters. The Public Building Reform Board, which advises GSA, recommended that the Trump administration sell the Energy Department’s headquarters. 

Members of the board later recommended that the administration demolish the Forrestal Building before sale, or agree to help a winning bidder demolish the building to accelerate future redevelopment

The Education Department said the Johnson Building is 70% vacant and that relocating will save the agency nearly $5 million annually.

GSA Administrator Edward Forst said in a statement that “eliminating underutilized, delinquent maintenance-heavy buildings is a top priority.”

About 40% of GSA’s owned buildings are in the national capital region.

“Today’s data shines a light on the usage of federal buildings and gives GSA a clear path to smarter space allocation,” Forst said. “With the problem defined, we can act: increase transparency, cut waste, and concentrate on a stronger core.”

GSA officials told employees last year that they would pull data from employees’ laptops to assess how many employees are in a building. Its website also states that agencies may use badge-swipes, timecards, video analytics and other tools to approximate how many employees are in its buildings.

Michael Peters, former commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told employees at a town hall last year that the agency would push for an 80% utilization goal for federal buildings.

In a report earlier this month, the Public Buildings Reform Board found GSA’s backlog of maintenance and repair projects for buildings it owns has grown to $50 billion — more than double the agency’s previous highest estimate — and that “radical reduction” of its real estate portfolio is necessary. Congress created the PBRB to help GSA identify underutilized federal buildings that it should sell or dispose of.

According to the PBRB, GSA receives a small fraction of the funding necessary to maintain its portfolio of owned buildings. At its current funding level, the board estimates GSA’s portfolio of owned buildings would need to shrink by 80%.

PBRB member Dan Mathews, the former PBS commissioner under the first Trump administration, told reporters on March 5 that “significant disposal is the only way to address this massive capital liability.”

“This administration is clearly focused on reducing the owned footprint, because it is unavoidable. It is the only path forward to solve this problem,” Mathews said.

Paul Walden, the board’s executive director, told Federal News Network on Tuesday that the board would use GSA’s new data dashboard as part of its criteria for upcoming recommendations.

“We’re not going to make any recommendations based solely on data that’s on that dashboard. We would validate it and look at other factors before we recommended a building for disposition,” Walden said.

Walden said GSA’s latest data underscores a point that the board has been making for years.

Using commercially available, anonymized cell phone data, the PBRB estimated that federal headquarters buildings operated at 12% of their estimated capacity, on average, for much of 2023.

“A lot of these older federal buildings are just inefficient in design, so it’s not terribly surprising. But again, I’d like to see how the data has been validated first,” Walden said.

Forst told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on March 4 that the agency is updating its own estimate of the maintenance backlog. Forst told lawmakers that GSA has long suspected its current $26 billion backlog estimate was outdated, and that the updated figure “may be eye-popping.”

“The maintenance delinquency is not abstract. A water leak left untreated becomes mold. A minor repair escalates into a major renovation,” Forst said. “It accelerates physical decay, compounds cost, erodes value. It should be unacceptable to all of us.”

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), chairwoman of the Senate DOGE Caucus, who has long criticized the federal government’s underutilized federal office space, said in a statement that GSA’s data shows that “the government needs to use the space or lose it.”

“This is exactly why I have worked to increase transparency for how the government is using taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Now that we know federal buildings are not even close to being fully used, we can get to work taking pricey property off the taxpayers’ tab,” Ernst said.

Last week, GSA sold its regional office building, which has been vacant since March 2025.

“One down, many more to go, and billions to save!” Ernst said.

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