The efforts to bring federal workers back into the office and to shrink the footprint of facilities overseen by the General Services Administration (GSA) are moving ahead, though federal officials are running into the complications in the form of reliable data on facilities that they can base decisions on.
Administration officials are setting a higher minimum occupancy standard for federal buildings as part of a governmentwide push to bring employees back to the office full time, according to the Federal News Network. The GSA, the federal government’s landlord, is planning to deploy new tools to ensure agencies make full use of their buildings. If not, GSA plans to make the underutilized office space available to other agencies or sell it.
Michael Peters, the commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told employees in a town hall meeting earlier this month that the agency is setting an 80 percent utilization goal for federal buildings. Peters said the GSA does not know how many people are in its buildings, adding that while it has an idea of how many people are in some buildings, the goal is to know the occupancy of every one of the facilities it owns or leases.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimated in August 2024 that telework-eligible employees were working in the office about 60 percent of the time. OMB determined that about one-half federal workforce is not telework-eligible and works onsite full-time.
Dan Mathews, a member of the Public Buildings Reform Board and a former Public Building Service commissioner under the first Trump administration, said some headquarters buildings in the Washington, D.C., metro area have basic occupancy data based on employees swiping their ID badges at security checkpoints. He added that data is rarely available for facilities outside Washington, D.C.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.?
